Gootube
So, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. What an odd business decision.
The Tube has a better interface than Google Video of course, but you could just hire a UI designer for that. And the Tube is hipper with the kids, so has more videos, but after they’ve been sued into oblivion, Google Video would be left standing. Just because you know they have better lawyers. And more money.
YouTube doesn’t make any money either, or so they say. It’s also said they spend a million bucks a month on bandwidth. But if Google have any plans to put ads before/after those videos, it’s pretty clear most of their users would disappear pretty fast. So using it as a money making scheme seems a little, I don’t know, far fetched. Especially since a large proportion of the videos viewed are actually via an embedded player in a blog somewhere.
So what are we left with after all this? Well, two rich founders that’s for sure. But I think we’re also left with another crazy dot-com boom business choice. YouTube is great, it’s simple, it’s reasonably fast, it’s cleanly designed, it’s free. Replace it with something that doesn’t fit all those criteria, and those kids that give it that hip moniker will desert it faster than a fat man leaves a restaurant when he hears they’re out of pudding.
