GROUPON CLIPPING

The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars. Time and again, businesses with seemingly dicey prospects have ended up becoming huge successes, and price tags that once seemed absurd have turned out to be bargains. But big companies have learned their lesson: these days, they’re positively obsessed with not missing the next big thing, and are willing to shell out huge sums of money in order to insure that they don’t. And when Google tried recently to acquire the two-year-old daily-deal site Groupon, for the seemingly outlandish sum of six billion dollars, it was hard not to wonder if the lessons of history had been learned too well.

Read more:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/12/20/101220ta_talk_surowiecki