Terry Semel was pissed. The Yahoo CEO had offered to buy Google for roughly $3 billion, but the young Internet search firm wasn't interested. Once upon a time, Google's founders had come to Yahoo for an infusion of cash; now they were turning up their noses at what Semel believed was a perfectly reasonable offer. Worse, Semel's lieutenants were telling him that, in fact, Google was probably worth at least $5 billion.

This was way back in the summer of 2002, two years before Google went public. An age before Google's stock soared above $500 a share, giving the company a market value of $147 billion -- right behind Chevron and just ahead of Intel.

An enlightening story which explains all the ins and outs of the delays behind Panama and Yahoo's failure to compete with Google in search.

At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.

Well worth a read....