Google has only accepted two rounds of investment so far, with a total funding of around 100 million US dollars. This 100 million dollars was essentially all used to purchase servers and bandwidth to maintain Google's basic services and product research and development.
Under normal circumstances, relying on the income from its advertising alliance, Google could generate considerable cash flow.
After all, Yahoo's advertising alliance truly brought in substantial revenue, with Yahoo itself earning tens of billions of dollars annually from this alliance.
However, the problem was that as a condition for cooperating with Yahoo, Google had to give 50% of its own revenue to Yahoo.
It must be understood that after joining the advertising alliance, all advertising revenue obtained had to be split 50/50 with Yahoo. Then, Google still had to give another 50% of its own revenue to Yahoo. This meant that Google could only receive 25% of all advertising revenue. Consequently, despite gaining a significant advertising business, Google's final income was barely enough to maintain its services, let alone fund expansion.
At the same time, Larry Page discovered that while joining Yahoo provided a massive boost in traffic, Yahoo was also restricting Google's own development.
Because 75% of all advertising revenue had to be handed over to Yahoo, it led to a lack of desire among Google employees, including Larry Page himself, to develop new features. After all, even if new features were released and more ads were obtained, the lion's share would still go to Yahoo, and they were essentially just working for Yahoo.
Therefore, after being given an ultimatum by Jerry Yang, Larry Page made up his mind to take this opportunity to completely break away from Yahoo. Otherwise, Google would only gradually become a mere appendage of Yahoo.
However, if they broke away from Yahoo, Google would face another very practical problem: a shortage of servers.
With the rapid development of its business, Google's server consumption was also enormous, but Google had not purchased new servers for over a year.
Generally speaking, for a large internet company, if it hasn't purchased new servers for over a year, it either means the company had stockpiled a large amount of server resources in advance, or the company is on a downward trend, with user numbers declining instead of increasing, thus not requiring as much computing power and storage resources.
For Google, neither of these scenarios applied. The real reason for not updating servers was that the surplus computing power and storage needs were provided by Yahoo.
Yahoo, being somewhat astute, did not simply squeeze Google dry. It kindly offered to bear the burden of the computing power and storage resources that Google lacked.
As a result, nearly half of Google's customer data was on Yahoo's servers, and two-thirds of its computing power needs were also met through Yahoo's servers.
When the two companies cooperated closely before, these were naturally not issues. But once they fell out, as they had now, problems arose.
For Google, user data was extremely important. If one day users logged into Google and accidentally discovered that all their recorded information was gone, it would be an absolutely disastrous outcome for Google. Countless users would be furious with Google, and Google would completely collapse.
Yahoo's cooperation deadline was set for three days later. This meant that within three days, Google had to find sufficient server resources to complete the transfer of all its legitimate user data. Otherwise, after three days, Yahoo could directly delete Google's data at any time.
This was tantamount to holding Google's data hostage.
Clearly, Yahoo had planned this all along, deliberately waiting until today to issue Larry Page an ultimatum. The goal was to catch Larry Page off guard, forcing him to willingly sell Google to Yahoo.
After all, Google's account only had less than 30 million US dollars left. Even disregarding the time constraints, this amount of money was definitely not enough to purchase sufficient storage servers to help Google store its data.
After all, Yahoo had consumed server resources equivalent to 150 million US dollars to store Google's data. Where could Larry Page find servers he could use for five times less the price?
The entire Yahoo organization was very confident that they had Google firmly in their grasp and that Google could not escape their control.
"I see. But I don't recall any such incident in Google's history, and Google and Yahoo's complete falling out was supposed to be next year!" Huang He murmured to himself.
According to Huang He's memory, Yahoo and Google did indeed fall out completely later on, but that was in 2004.
At the same time, Yahoo's attempt to acquire Google also happened in 2004. After that acquisition failed, Yahoo very decisively removed Google from its homepage and replaced it with its own developed Yahoo search engine, marking a complete separation.
Therefore, although Google experienced a period of decline after the separation, there were no reports of data issues. Moreover, Google quickly overcame the downturn and began its legendary journey of surpassing Yahoo.
He had never heard of Yahoo threatening Google with server resources.
Well, Huang He obviously didn't know that such an event was actually his own doing.
It was precisely because Huang He had leveraged the resource advantages of QQ and Facebook to put pressure on Jerry Yang that Jerry Yang gained a deeper understanding of the importance of traffic channels. He suddenly realized that the entry point for traffic was still the most crucial thing for internet companies.
Thus, Jerry Yang suddenly remembered that Google Search's traffic entry point in the United States seemed to be larger than Yahoo's.
Yahoo had conducted a market survey on which default homepage users set in their browsers, and which page they manually opened first.
This was a market survey Yahoo conducted annually. In the first few years after Yahoo's inception, Yahoo firmly held the top spot in this ranking.
For all American netizens, opening their browsers and seeing Yahoo first had become a habitual occurrence.
However, the situation changed this year. Jerry Yang was somewhat alarmed to find that while Yahoo was still the number one option for the default browser homepage, the first page manually opened, meaning accessed through a web click or by directly entering a web address, had become Google.
Moreover, this number was as many as 4 million more. This figure, in the context of America's approximately 40 million internet users at the time, was a terrifying number, accounting for a full tenth.
Jerry Yang sensed a chill. He realized that the number one traffic entry point in the American internet landscape had shifted from Yahoo to Google.
Even if this was not an established fact, it was definitely the prevailing trend.
Upon understanding that traffic entry points were the most important aspect for internet companies and that the number one traffic entry point in America was shifting towards Google, Jerry Yang, being no fool, understood what he needed to do.
In his historical timeline, Jerry Yang at that time was ambitious, believing Yahoo was invincible. Even after seeing this report, he didn't consider Google to be significant enough to threaten Yahoo's dominance.
Moreover, Google and Yahoo had a very pleasant cooperative relationship at the time, and Jerry Yang, without much deliberation, abandoned the idea of forcing a purchase of Google.
It wasn't until 2004, when both the default browser homepage and the manually opened webpage became Google, that Jerry Yang began to pressure Google for a purchase.
This time, due to Huang He's influence, Jerry Yang grasped Google's importance early and began pressuring Google more than half a year in advance.
As for the server issue, the server usage agreement between Google and Jerry Yang was a three-year contract, and this time marked the expiration of the first signed agreement and the need for renewal.
Historically, Google had already signed the second agreement. Therefore, even when Yahoo exerted pressure in 2004, it couldn't use server resources as a means to oppress Google, because Google's server usage term still had two years remaining.
However, this time, Google did not have the opportunity to sign the second agreement. Unless Google agreed to sell itself to Yahoo, Yahoo would not continue to provide server resources to Google.
This was another instance of Huang He, like a small butterfly, changing the world.
Huang He couldn't quite grasp the intricacies of the matter immediately, but he didn't need to. He discovered that the opportunity to invest in Google had presented itself. The chance to acquire the true king of America's future internet industry had unexpectedly landed right in his lap.
It seemed he had done a lot of good deeds in this life to have such a good opportunity.
"Mr. Page, I personally sympathize with your predicament and find Yahoo's actions abhorrent. I will firmly stand by your side and offer my assistance!" Huang He said this first, to comfort Larry Page's fragile and wounded spirit, then he changed tack, "However, Mr. Page, the importance of pricing strategy for a company, I believe you understand it better than I do. Regarding pricing, we cannot afford any compromise, otherwise, we will face endless trouble!"
"Really?" Larry Page showed a wry smile, then sighed, "But what choice do I have? Even if I seek support from those large investment groups, they won't be able to provide me with massive funds within three days!"
"Ahem, don't worry, we have alternative solutions!" Upon hearing Larry Page mention seeking investment from other capital, the flesh around Huang He's face twitched slightly, and he continued, "We can sell you our servers at our original price, but I didn't say you have to pay immediately!"