1) Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Excite CEO George Bell in 1999, to sell their search engine at $1 million. After rejecting the initial offering, the pair went down to $750,000, but Bell still rejected it.
Today, Google is valued at around $498 billion.
2) The Coca Cola Company made a series of errors in the early 20th century, when its biggest rival, Pepsi, struggled to avoid bankruptcy. On at least three occasions Coca Cola was offered the chance to buy the company – but never did. The companies have vied for supremacy in the cola market ever since.
3) Twelve publishing houses rejected JK Rowling's Harry Potter manuscript before Bloomsbury finally took her on following the advice of the company chairman's eight-year-old daughter Alice.
The books were subsequently translated into over 60 languages and have earned Rowling a reported $1bn (£670m).
4) There was a time when the corporate giant known as Apple worked in a garage, but when they went to Atari to sell their revolutionary personal computers, they said no. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak the founders of Apple even said, hey, it’s built from your parts, and you can have the computer just let us work for you – but still the answer was no.
Apple now has a market value in the 100s of billions of dollars, whereas Atari pretty much faded into obscurity.
5) James Howells bought 7,500 Bitcoins in 2009 when their value was next to nothing. By 2013, one Bitcoin was worth £613, giving the Welshman a portfolio worth £4.5m. The only trouble? He'd left his hard drive tucked away in a drawer for years and then thrown it away without a minute's thought. After realising his mistake, he made a hopeful trip to his local landfill site where he was told the hard drive could be at any spot under around 5ft of rubbish.
6) NASA used the metric system to build an orbiter, while Lockheed Systems used the English system.
Data couldn’t be transferred, and a $125 million orbiter was lost in space forever.
7) The costliest mistake ever from my point of view was made by Mughal emperor Jahangir in 1612. The mistake was providing business licence to Thomas Roe from East India Company to start the business in Surat, India.
The Country known as Golden Bird , the country with 0%import 100%export was destroyed and looted. The world richest empire was bought down to the verge of poverty and hunger.
