I love the internet industry. It’s probably the only industry in the world where it can be better to be the new and tiny tech start-up than the massive corporation. Being big means nothing. It didn’t save any of the major search engines from Google kicking their ass. A decade latter and it didn’t save Google from YouTube kicking their ass.
More recently however the response from the established media is just to buy out the new start-ups. There are a million examples of this that I can’t think of but here’s a quick few: Google bought Picasa and Blogger, Yahoo bought Launch, Fox bought MySpace. Those are bad examples as they aren’t really Web 2.0 except MySpace in which case Fox is old media rather than established new media. But I hope you can get the point.
Yahoo are currently in talks to buy Facebook while recently Google closed a deal to buy YouTube. The price was a hefty $1.6 billion adding yet more fuel to the idea that Fox got an absolute bargin when paying only a third of that for MySpace.
Is this a good thing though? I wasn’t big on the idea. I was naive enough to believe YouTube CEO Chad Hurley when he said he wasn’t planning to sell out (I know, I know but I like to believe there are some people out there like myself who are in it for the business and not purely for the money, he seemed like one of them). YouTube was amazing because it so powerful even though it was still an independent and brand new tech start-up (it’s only been around like 18 months or so) and there aren’t really any problems for Google to come in and solve like Fox could have done for MySpace (but haven’t for some reason).
Of course it was a good move for Google – their currently offering, Google Video sucks. It really does. Yeah it’s an ok service but it’s not the type of offering an exciting new tech start-up would roll out. It was the type of offering a large corporation that can leverage it’s existing userbase would roll out. YouTube rolled out the exciting tech start-up style offering, Google just isn’t that company any more.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.