https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
> In 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were looking to sell Google to search engine Excite for about $750,000. But Excite's CEO George Bell passed on the offer
And you can add the CEO of excite to that list too I suppose. So pretty much a short list of the who's who of the internet in 1999 didn't think Google was worth even a million dollars.
I would enjoy finding a collection of backstage tales like this that collectively serve to undermine the broad and unsubstantiated belief - our current generation's disguised version of the great man theory - that Superior Visionaries always know just how dominant their ideas will be (and who deserve to be proportionately rewarded for their vision and boldness and risk-taking blah blah blah) to the humble desk jockeys and implementers who end up working for them.
When they were first produced, transistors were only marginally more useful than tubes. They were finicky to produce, mechanically fragile, and tended to age rapidly.
Gasoline was thought too explosive for any use, and dumped into the nearest stream to get rid of it.
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
and then went on to say
> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Today, Dropbox is a public company. Its net income for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $540M, a 47% increase year-over-year. I think that should count as successful.
Years passed. Until another 3M scientist, who was struggling with the bookmarks he put in the choir hymnals continuously falling out, thought about his colleague's odd sticky non-adhesive thingamajig. And voila! Post-its were born.
> It was not initially popular, since its user interface was different from the leading word processor at the time, WordStar.[20] However, Microsoft steadily improved the product, releasing versions 2.0 through 5.0 over the next six years. ... The first version of Word for Windows was released in 1989. With the release of Windows 3.0 the following year, sales began to pick up and Microsoft soon became the market leader for word processors for IBM PC-compatible computers.[13]