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Anyone else remember the beginnings of youtube? Google tried to compete with them, with their own Google Videos. It sucked - and I remember reading how the engineers running it couldn't even figure out why they lost. In the end, Google just had to buy their competition, because they couldn't figure out any other way to win.

They've tried to compete elsewhere, too, and I don't think they've ever been able to make a go of it outside their cash cow. The only thing they've really been able to do is 'search results + ads'.

I don't think they'll be able to modify that winning combo even in the slightest and still be successful. And in this case, they can't buy the competition. Micro$oft already did.

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Disclosure: work at google

YouTube was founded in ~2005. Google bought it in 2006. It is now 2023.

YouTube has spent 2 years as its own company and 17 as part of Google.

Try to remember what YouTube functionality was in 2006. It was very different and has grown a lot.

The narrative that Google doesn’t know how to innovate YouTube doesn’t add up.

Youtube now is 90% of what it was 10 years ago and what might it good in 2006 is the same reason it's good now, the UI is clean and it's easy to use. That's it. Also, following the acquisition, for many years most of the people working on it were the original Youtube folk, not the "Google people."

Google hasn't shown they can do new product in a very long time... see the GCP mess, Stadia, and the hundreds of other total failures (Plus, Wave, and many I've forgotten).

Google has to dump Sundar and bring in a more old school leader. Google is a massive company and has to stop doing it's "everything is beta all the time, with teams internally competing for the same territory"

I'm so put off by it, and been made a fool by it so many times, I'm phasing out Google in my life and long ago stopped recommending Google products to people in my life.

YouTube was grabbing lots of attention and with the attention comes ad revenue so it made perfect sense for Google to buy YouTube and scale it up. YouTube grew into something exceptionally valuable for both the Google and the people who use it.

The point is that they had to buy youtube, not that they weren't able to put a shiny interface on top after they bought it.

What I'm trying to get at is, imagine if Microsoft bought youtube before google could - given Google's track record with their own video search, they would not have been able to compete with youtube, and they would almost certainly have simply lost that market. I think that's what happened here. Google is amazing at algorithms, but has very little business sense...they can buy a successful product, but rarely create one of their own.

the point was that Google Video sucked and wasn't able to beat YouTube.

Same story for Google+

Google+ was better than Facebook, which was its primary competitor. The problem there was the same that any new social network has: nobody is going to switch if they can't bring most of their social graph over.

Was it though? Maybe for some users in some use cases?

Clearly TikTok is a better surveillance network and managed just fine.

Google already has a trackrecord of beating Microsoft. Do you remember Windows Phone? Well Google made Android in response to Windows Phone + Bing threat not in response to iPhone.

Well, Steve Ballmer wasn't exactly an innovator - just kept milking the cash cow.

Satya Nadella seems way more tuned into the zeitgeist. His heavy bet on OpenAI may seem excessive, but at worst it's going to be cheap insurance and at best may be a game changer.

I think Google's producing Android was a reaction to BOTH iPhone and Windows Phone - they didn't want to be frozen out of the mobile advertizing market by competitors that owned the platforms.

Windows Phone launched in late 2010, long after Android. Do you mean Windows CE / Windows Mobile? But if so, those weren't really a serious threat to anyone.

Yeah I meant Windows Mobile/Phone.

Google bought Android Inc. in 2005, 5 years before the launch of Windows Phone.

..and Chrome

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