There's a similar story about the search engine game. Yahoo had a chance to buy better search engine technology, the only problem was it was too good.

If people quickly found what they wanted, they wouldn't spend any time on your page. Time-spent-on-page is how Yahoo measured engagement, and thus ad-revenue. Improving Yahoo's search engine would have threatened existing revenue streams, and Google would be a terrible investment for them, given the metrics in use at the time.