The proposal, however, like so many Yellow Pages books today, was tossed into the bin and instead a plan was hatched to double revenue at Sensis to more than $3bn by 2011 and position the business as “the leading one-stop shop for helping Australians to find, buy and sell”.

“We’re outgrowing Google in Australia,” Trujillo said. “We’re doing more, we’re growing faster and we have more capability, because we’re more relevant.”

This week, history revealed just how wrong the brash American was on his predictions for both Google and Sensis after Telstra sold a 70 per cent stake in the White and Yellow Pages publisher to private equity firm Platinum Equity for $454 million.

With Telstra’s remaining stake thrown in, it gives Sensis a total value of $650m.

Today, Google is worth more than $430bn.

One wonders who Trujillo thinks is more relevant now?

For the 1.4 million Telstra shareholders who might feel cheated on the sale, it’s worth noting that getting out with something is better than getting out with nothing or, worse, getting stuck with huge debts.

There’s also solace in the knowledge that the fall of Sensis is not exclusive to Telstra.

The value of directories businesses worldwide, particularly the ones desperate to hold on to print revenues, have fallen off a cliff as small and medium-sized companies with their small and medium-sized budgets spend more wisely, opting to go online through web content, Facebook and better search engine optimisation.

The walking fingers of the Yellow Pages are still moving, but the walking is now taking place on keyboards and smartphones, not in print.

It’s easy to see why the owners of these stocky-spined directories have had to be weaned off the revenues from these once lucrative businesses. Like Telstra’s monopoly copper network, the Yellow Pages was a cash cow, generating margins of more than 60 per cent.

In fact, the business of classifieds and ad sales was so profitable for Telstra that the telco giant even flirted with a proposal in 2004 to acquire Fairfax for $3.5bn.

It was an unabashed play to tap into the rivers of gold classified pages dominated by the big newspapers of Fairfax and News Corporation.

While that deal never went through, the telco did expand its media reach when it beat Fairfax to the acquisition of Trading Post Group for $636m. Telstra finally had its classified prize to sit alongside its directories arm.

The only problem was that at the same time Google, a company made of digital DNA, had quickly established itself as the advertising and listings go-to site on the maturing worldwide web.

While Sensis was hassling businesses to submit their paid ads in time for deadline for the printed Yellow Pages, Google was revolutionising online ad platforms where deadlines did not exist and listings were cheap.

The problem for Sensis was that because it generated almost two-thirds of its revenues from print, it was heavily exposed to the risk of declining dead tree circulations as readers increasingly moved online where content was often free and easier to access.

It’s why in the past decade physical copies of the Yellow Pages have increasingly been found propping open doors or in recycling bins and landfills.

And it’s why other telcos, including BT Group in Britain and Telecom New Zealand, left the business early.

BT sold out in 2000 when it offloaded its directories arm for $4bn. In 2007, Telecom NZ sold its directories arm to a private equity consortium for $2.1bn, a multiple of 14 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. Telstra’s sale this week represented a paltry 2.4 multiple.

There have been bigger and better sales. For example, there was the $9.3bn KKR & Co paid for France Telecom’s Pages Jaunes in 2006 and the sale of US-based Qwest Communications’ directories for $8bn in 2002. But by 2009, the writing was on the wall for directories, many of which have since gone into administration or have devolved into pygmies of their former selves.

The same lessons can be applied to them all: they missed the digital boat.

In Telstra’s case it made a last-ditch attempt to stem the digital tide by signing a syndication deal with Google in 2009 to allow Yellow Pages listings to appear on Google searches.

But it was too little too late. In early 2010, Sensis was forced to report its first ever decline in revenue as it continued to be hit by the digital storm brought on by cheaper and more effective online challengers led by Google.

To Telstra’s credit the company tried to get Sensis back on track, unveiling in 2011 a plan to end revenue losses and transform it into a digital information and marketing services provider for small to medium-sized businesses. But the big telco was just too slow and too much ground had been lost to Google and Facebook, and more recently Yelp and Urban Spoon, which had by then begun focusing their efforts on smartphone apps and more immersive social media sites.

Private equity might be picking up a declining asset in Sensis but at least it’s done so for a rock bottom price.

Other private equity firms haven’t been so lucky. Qwest and Sprint in the US both sold their directories arms in 2002 for billion-dollar profits. But the company that ended up managing the two businesses, Dex One, filed for bankruptcy in 2009 in a bid to cut a $12bn debt bill in half.

US telecoms giant Verizon Communications’ Yellow Pages suffered a similar fate when it filed for bankruptcy three years after it was spun off as a separate, stand-alone business.

Sensis is now facing a period of radical surgery as Platinum excises costs and probably jobs from the company to transform it into a more nimble player that will be able to exploit gaps in the local ad market that Google and others miss.

With a 30 per cent stake, Telstra will share in any financial pain or glory that comes Sensis’s way.

As Telstra boss David Thodey mused on Monday when quizzed on the missed opportunity a decade ago to sell Sensis at its $12bn peak: “It is what it is.”