Year of the Code Monkey
Because Jonah Bishop Said So
Google has apparently bought out YouTube, which is a rather surprising move. Greg Linden predicts that this will be the point in history where people say that Google jumped the shark. While I don’t think things are quite that extreme, I certainly don’t fully understand this acquisition.
Perhaps the Google higher-ups have insights that we do not. Or perhaps Google felt like dropping 1.6 billion (with a b) dollars for no good reason. It should be interesting to see what happens to YouTube as things move forward. Will Google Video be rolled into the YouTube look and feel? Or vice versa?
October 10, 2006 at 5:27 pm
Well, I’m no expert on these things, but it looks like the usual buy-your-competition business strategy. Like that time Microsoft bought out The Internet King. YouTube is more popular than Google Video (I have no numbers to back that up, but I don’t see as many Google Video links on the internet as I do YouTube links), but Google has much more cash. Google is also more interested in selling videos, whereas YouTube is more social-oriented, so I’m sure their goal would be something that takes the best of both worlds.
Or it could be the buy-companies-you-think-show-promise, like when they bought the companies that developed Picasa and Google Earth.