Two Guys Walk Into Yahoo and...

One day these two college kids show up at Yahoo and try to sell them this idea they have. Yahoo says no and pretty much tosses them out of the building.

The idea?

It became Google.

Microsoft later offers $44 billion dollars for Yahoo and they laugh at it. Now they are begging Verizon to follow through with their $4.8 billion dollar offer.
This is one of those interesting bits of information you see on the internet sometimes, but what can you do with it in your life?

You can't just keep doing what you are doing.

WAKE UP!

Look at Kodak and Poloroid. You just can't keep doing what you are doing and thinking the way you are thinking.

Kodak was losing $200 million a year on their film business while holding patents on digital photography.

By the time they went into bankruptcy, their patents were out of date. They were worth billions of dollars, but went stale on the shelf.

In a changing world you can't just keep doing what you are doing and you simply must have a direction to focus your efforts on. You have to be aware of what is going on in the world, in your world.

By the way, in the year 2000 Blockbuster laughed Netflix out of their office when Netflix was losing money and the investors wanted to cut their losses and sell cheap. Blockbuster told them what Blockbuster was doing was working just fine and they didn't see any value in Netflix. Of course in just a matter of years the world changed, people started renting movies online without late fees and trips to the video store and Blockbuster declared bankruptcy.

If you don't change what you are doing after reading this, you will have a lot of company, but it won't be any successful companies.

Want one more? Xerox was years ahead of anyone in personal and office computers, but they had this hang up, the screen was narrow and tall like a sheet of paper, after all they were a paper print and copy company. So they hire Steve Jobs for this little job and while is there he sees the computer they have and they say, it isn't really that big of a deal. People here don't even use it.

Steve had this big idea from what he saw. The big idea? Steve turned the screen sideways like a photograph of the day and revamped his ideas about computers to more of a horizontal interface. The new idea became Apple and Lisa, then the Macintosh. The rest is history, but not Xerox's history. Jobs said he laid awake at night wondering why Xerox hadn't turned the screen sideways and why they weren't marketing their computer.

His partners told him to hush and not make a big deal of it. "You might wake up someone at Xerox!"

I am saying to you today, "WAKE UP!"

Best and be blest,
Scott Hogue CChH