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points by chimeracoder 14 hours ago | 0 comments
When YouTube was acquired by Google, it was already pretty similar in shape as a product to what it is now. The biggest differences are scale, the addition of advertising, and ancillary integration with other Google services. The first is a function of growth, the second is exactly what Google would be expected to do to monetize the service, and the third is another logical implication of "acquisition". (You could quibble and say they added vertical shorts and live video, but I don't think those are even fundamentally different from a product perspective from what YouTube was already doing in 2006, just fast-forwarded to adapt to the consumer technology we have today).

That's very different from Android, which was an unreleased prototype that had zero users and was dramatically different even from what ended up shipping as the first product, let alone what it is today. Android at acquisition would be unrecognizable from what the majority of people worldwide are typing on this very minute.

[–] phoghed 13 hours ago
Yes certainly if you discount the 20 years of development, the creator tools, the advertiser tools, monetizing creators, live streaming, completely rewriting the whole thing, etc. Google didn't develop YouTube much.
[–] chimeracoder 13 hours ago
> Yes certainly if you discount the 20 years of development, the creator tools, the advertiser tools, monetizing creators, live streaming, completely rewriting the whole thing, etc. Google didn't develop YouTube much.

I never made that claim.

[–] phoghed 11 hours ago
Ah yes my mistake to respond to the spirit and reasonable implications of your comment rather than just the literal words contained in it.
[–] chimeracoder 2 hours ago
If that's what you think the "spirit and reasonable implications" are, then you didn't understand what I said.
[–] spwa4 13 hours ago
Are you serious? Just the hardware build Google did for Youtube alone. They 1000x (not %, times) their backbone bandwidth and they're still increasing it. Youtube used to have 2 small datacenters where they were acquired. Now it's 20% or so of half of the total Google DCs.

That's nothing?

[–] chimeracoder 13 hours ago
> Are you serious? Just the hardware build Google did for Youtube alone. They 1000x (not %, times) their backbone bandwidth and they're still increasing it. Youtube used to have 2 small datacenters where they were acquired. Now it's 20% or so of half of the total Google DCs.

> That's nothing?

Either you replied to the wrong comment or you didn't read the comment you're replying to.