Monday, October 09, 2006

Life’s Little Conveniences

So, I bought a box of popsicles the other day when Angelina had a sore throat. The box had 4 different colors, yellow, red, purple, and orange. As it turns out Angelina’s favorite colors of popsicle are yellow and orange, mine happen to be purple and red. Every color in the box gets eaten, it’s so perfect.

Enough with the mushy stuff, on to business:
Google bought Youtube today. I think that it’s a pretty risky move by google given that youtube doesn’t exactly have a product that can’t be duplicated. Sure, youtube is far and away the best site for streaming video, however it’s not like another site, or google themselves, couldn’t have bettered their video streaming capabilities (in google’s case they could have done this without having to shell out over a billion dollars). However, some may say that even if other sites are able to duplicate youtube’s ability to convieniently stream video they couldn’t duplicate the brand loyalty built up in the youtube name. The problem with that argument is that is that there is already some backlash on youtube as they are being seen as owned by “the man” (I personally don’t know when or how google became “the man” but that’s for another post), as an example here’s a comment from msnbc’s discussion board:

“I Can't really fault the folks at YouTube for taking the money — most people would. But I think this deal will probably lead to YouTube becoming irrelevant. That is, it will mostly likely require a user fee that most people won't want to pay, or be covered in splashy ads. Either way, it will turn into just another corporate entity that pretends to be hip. The coolness of YouTube was that it was a maverick and was kind of "for the people," "by the people" without a lot of corporate nonsense. No more.”

For better and more ellequent commentary on this topic (that has probably been proofread at least once, unlike this post) click the Mark Cuban link in the top right corner and read his last couple blogs.

1 comment:

Adam Samons said...

Yeah, in fact the copyright issue is the bigger of the two issues. The only reason I didn't bring it up here is because Cuban really hammers home that issue on his blog, so if anyone happened to read Cuban’s blog my comments would only be superfluous ranting.