Netflix went public with market capitalization of $6.5 billion

There are times when you look back on your career and all you can think is: "Oops. I really screwed up that time." You have to assume that's what former Blockbuster CEO John Antioco says to himself every time he remembers a meeting he had in Dallas in September 2000--and every time he streams a movie to his TV.

In his new book That Will Never Work, Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph describes a meeting he attended with Antioco along with Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and its then-CFO Barry McCarthy at Blockbuster headquarters in Dallas. Everyone from Blockbuster who was at that meeting must cringe when they think back on it now. The company could have bought Netflix that day for $50 million, but its CEO didn't even bother to consider the possibility. He seemed to see it as a great big joke. If you are in lack of Netflix Accounts, visit our site z2u.com, a reliable and cheap online in-game currency store.

Two years later, Netflix went public with market capitalization of $6.5 billion. In 2007, the company first began offering streaming movies to its customers, as opposed to DVD rentals through the mail. Streaming eventually came to dominate the company's business model. Blockbuster reached its peak in November 2004, with 84,300 employees and 9,094 stores worldwide.

This isn't the first time that a company missed out on an opportunity that could have shifted continents of the business world. There have been other bitter "what ifs" including: Verizon shunning Apple for the first model of the iPhone, Comcast foregoing Disney, Friendster refusing Google, and AOL merging with Time Waer instead of AT&T. Perhaps the company that made the biggest blunder in tech history is Yahoo, which had chances to buy both Google and Facebook.