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Google’s Bid For World Domination

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As you might have heard, Google went and acquired YouTube for a mere $1.65 billion. Time will tell if this was a brilliant business move or not. I believe Google’s acquisition is far more savvy than News Corps’ purchase of MySpace. MySpace is a mess and by the time anyone figures out how to make lots of money from the venture, the kids who give the site its buzz will be on to the next big thing.

But YouTube? There’s a different animal. Whether it’s $1.65 billion is debatable, but YouTube’s model — easily syndicated and shared content — gives the site a broader appeal. You don’t have to go to YouTube; it can come to you. Every time a little player is embedded in a website, YouTube’s brand is extended into the public consciousness. Google, being Google, will not be long in figuring out how to turn this into money. Simplest way is to leverage the sites who use AdSense and embed video.
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That’s What I Like: Google

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So, I’ve been doing this goofy thing at my other place. Given my readership, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who notices it, but that’s how these things go. I make yourself happy and that’s all that matters. In the process of this goofy thing, I’ve had to do a little bit of online research. Not much, nothing heavy — like today, I had to verify the correct title of a Jazz Butcher song.

I could have dragged myself across the room, shoved my feet into shoes, found the garage keys, and pulled the correct disk from the now-banished rack o’CDs — which would have required shuffling through a lot of music because I wasn’t even sure what era the song was recorded (there are multiple Jazz Butcher eras, you know). Or I could type “Jazz Butcher Lot 49” into my handy little search bar at the top of Firefox (love this feature, too!).

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Are the Browser Wars Back? Nah.

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Hey kids, remember the Browser Wars? They took place wayyyyyy back in the mid-1990s when Microsoft realized that the Web as experienced via Netscape could steal the desktop right out from under their thumb. So they figured, “we gotta get us a piece of that action,” and launched Internet Explorer.

Which totally sucked for a couple of iterations, until IE 4, which was good enough to combine with their natural monopoly on the business user and eventually lead to Netscape’s downfall.

This all took a few years, and anybody working on the Web at that period had to do QA testing for about a dozen different Browser/Operating System combinations. My guess is that many were somewhat happy for MS to win the browser wars, even as they mourned a technology that essentially changed the world.

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