As Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) gets ready for another round of talks with Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) about buying its search business, the news that CEO Steve Ballmer killed two chances to get into search several years ago has emerged.
While there is some chance that the new chief of Yahoo! may elect to keep the portal company's search business, there is little reason not to at least hear Microsoft's latest offer.
Ballmer had the opportunity for MSFT to build online search empire almost ten years ago. According to The Wall Steed Journal, "In 2000, before Google married Web search with advertising, Microsoft had a rudimentary system that did the same, called Keywords, running on the Web. Advertisers began signing up. " For reasons that are hard to fathom, the world largest software company thought that an ad business built on search could hurt revenue from its other businesses. Microsoft also had the chance to buy a relatively small search company and passed.
Should Ballmer be blamed for not seeing beyond the horizon to a day when search would be the driving force of the internet? Probably not. Yahoo! did not push its search initiatives as hard as it might have. It was no secret that technology companies could build systems for searching the web. The Altavista search business built by Digital Equipment in the late 1990s was a successful search technology in its day.
Like the invention of Windows, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) success at search has something to do with being at the right place at the right time. It was a better mouse trap, but five years ago the internet was becoming mature enough to need it. If Google was launched five years earlier when the worldwide web was young, it might be footnote in the Internet's history.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24/7 Wall St. Disclosure: McIntyre was a classmate of Ballmer's at Harvard College.
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