To get the maximum shopping variety, we now turn to Amazon instead of their ancestor - the Sears catalogue.

This has to be one of the worst, mistimed exits in history. Sears stopped sending out the catalog in 1993. Amazon was founded in 1994. Clearly Sears already had the infrastructure in place to bring customers and “home delivery” together, they’d been doing it for decades. But I suspect they didn’t have a single computer literate person in the hierarchy of the organization and never thought about it, I presume. Not that the trajectory of on-line would have been the same, just an interesting business juxtaposition.

Speaking of which: Western Union had the chance to buy the telephone from Alexander Bell, but said “Nah, nothing there.”

Yahoo had the chance (twice!) to buy Google for a pittance, but bid low.

Viacom could have had Facebook for $1.5B, but passed.

Blockbuster showed the Netflix boys the door when they came looking to sell.

Both Oracle and Cisco had offers to buy Salesforce, but didn’t.

Of course Microsoft could have bought all of Apple for a pittance after the dark days of Sculley but didn’t, and thank goodness for that.

Lots of opportunities flubbed. Probably more that I haven’t thought of.