Tech

As usual, I have mixed feelings about the ‘big news’ in the web business… Google just bought out youtube. On the plus side, Google is big enough that it can support youtube’s tremendous bandwidth requirements, which seemed poised on the threshold of either achieving critical mass for success by tweaking it’s business model or simply collapsing under it’s own weight.

As an asset, youtube’s technology and customer base don’t seem worth the price, but eliminating the largest alternative to google video does give Google a new window of opportunity to steer the market in some new direction (hopefully they had something interesting in mind before making such a purchase).

Free service customer bases are fickle, though. To lose all benefit of what they just bought, all it would take would be for Google to make some radical mistep in trying to monetize video streaming (unlikely), or for a new service with a fresh twist to catch on (very likely).

Beyond that, though, I can’t help wishing corporations (even ones keeping ‘don’t be evil’ in mind) would stop gobbling up every interesting new company that starts to get traction… Defeating challengers by simply buying them isn’t a very inspiring approach to innovation.

As often happens in the tech world, this new feature follows the pattern: implement, then plan. A year ago, a commonly reported figure was that every second, a new weblog was being started. This morning, I had no idea I’d be joining that ever-increasing throng…

Yet here I am. Perhaps this can be taken as a cautionary tale (you may be next).