The story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin is like that of many other successful people - they were at the right place at the right time.

The thing that jumped out at me is the number of times things could have worked against the two of them. Persistence and dumb luck had a lot to do with where they are today (not everything, but a lot). I want to be that dumb/lucky.

I’ve been struggling to make sense of the Google/YouTube merger that was announced earlier this week, mentioned here in this blog. I’m not seeing the point of it, and my concerns seem to be somewhat vindicated given how quickly legal action has been threatened against the newly acquired provider of loads of copyrighted and illegally shared media.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps this story isn’t about any of the potential technology or synergy or cultural issues that people are talking about. This story is about a shift in Google’s corporate culture.

Google has done quite a bit of innovative and interesting work. Their search is their bread and butter but they deserve to be respected for so much more. Gmail, Google Maps, Earth and News either redefined the playing field that they entered or opened up whole new arenas of competition.

And then there was Google Video. There’s nothing to love about Google Video. It works, but since it was late to the game and brought nothing really new or exciting to suggest it, nobody really got enthused about it. Google themselves never really seemed all that excited about Video - though Google is known for their spartan design aesthetic, they did an even worse job than usual slapping together the Video interface. And their commercial section has been a laughable competitor in the face of iTunes dominance.

Now, I understand that you don’t always hit the ball out of the park every time you come to the plate. But Google just gave up, didn’t even try to compete - this is why they bought YouTube. Google wants to be #1 in every area they engage, and they weren’t getting there with their homegrown Video. Rather than persist, build a better product, make innovations and compelling improvements, they went with the established player.

And payed $1.65 billion for it.

This is standard corporate behavior. Let somebody else take the risk and snap up whatever rises to the top. Google, in their ever so brief time on top, has already undergone the transformation from tech innovator to corporate leviathan.

That didn’t take long.

In an earlier post I revealed that my blogging activities had a sinister purpose.

Unlike many bloggers, I don’t feel the need to bare dark personal secrets in this space. Anyway, I don’t have too many juicy bits of gossip that anybody (other than my mother) would care to listen to. Rather, I simply want to talk about whatever interests me (gasp!). Well that, and to learn through practical experience what moves web traffic and how crowds respond.

So I wrote some content that wouldn’t make Robert X. Cringely fear for his job but similarly wasn’t shabby for a 30 minute morning hobby. At times I’d submit my work to news sites like digg and newsvine and reddit. Not much (nothing, actually) made it to the top of any of those lists. And in the three months I’ve been doing this I haven’t developed a following of rabidly supportive followers, ready to raise the banner in whatever direction I tell them for my cause de jeur.

I wouldn’t consider this a failure of the experiment, merely an indication that I haven’t figured out the formula to this whole thing - and since this has been a very casual experiment, who knows if I will ever get the formula thing down. I understand there is time (and effort!) involved in being popular.

All that to say this - I did a Google search today on “whatever’s interesting”. This site is number one. What!? I don’t know how many people search on that exact phrase - it seems rather unlikely that a huge amount of people would - but that’s just cool. Check it out.

What’s weird to me is that N and I now have something like 40 posts going. A search for this site (the syntax for this is “site:whateversinteresting.blogspot“) on Google only shows seven entries. And it’s not just the first seven that they grabbed, but rather a random smattering.
Unsure exactly what that means.

Anyway, my social experimentation has entered a new season of its life. I’m happy that at least I’m in Google now. If somebody’s looking for a story about surly chain-smoking police monkeys, we’re going to be getting hits galore.

Edit: Here, as well, I’m duping what N already posted. I warned that I got all my material from N, but this is just silly.

Google buying YouTube makes no sense. Then again, they’re the gazillionnaires and I’m not - it’s quite possible that I’m missing something critical here. Still, I doubt it.

For those of you that missed it, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. That’s a lot of money, but since YouTube has managed to remain on top of the video sharing pile even with some serious competition, the YouTube brand/feature set/whatever has become very valuable.

Exactly why YouTube is valuable, though, is a mystery to me. The RIAA, MPAA et al must be licking their chops right now, thinking of the huge amount of money they can sue Google for. YouTube didn’t used to be an attractive target for litigation because, frankly, there was little confidence that legal action would result in a payout.

Then there’s the fact that YouTube is a big time money pit. It is speculated that YouTube’s monthly loses on bandwidth alone now exceed several million dollars. YouTube employs 67 employees in a company that doesn’t have a clear business model. Advertisers are wary of signing with YouTube because they don’t want their brand to be associated with the vast amount of the (tasteless) content that exists on YouTube.

So YouTube is a liability legally and financially. What’s more, because of the reason stated above as well as by the nature of the content YouTube serves, there’s no clear way that YouTube’s acquisition will actually help Google in the only way that really matters - selling ads. Adwords is the big money-maker for Google - “Ads Everywhere” is just as appropriate a motto for the company as “Don’t be Evil.” How is acquiring YouTube going to help Google serve better, more targeted search results and ads to its users?

Could it possibly be that Google is simply buying YouTube in order to take a competitor to its own video service off the acquisition market, increasing the cost for any other potential buyers (Disney, News Corp., Yahoo) to develop rival services? If so, is video content on the Internet, in the manner delivered by YouTube, that intrinsically valuable?

And all you Microsoft bashing Google fanboys don’t realise it.

I’m not saying that Google is the new anti-competitive bully, though that might be true. My assertion here is that Google is the new writer of bland but universal applications that everybody will hate and complain about in a few years time.

History lesson. Microsoft beat everybody else back in the day by making their software hardware independent. Thus Microsoft succeeded while Apple, and everybody else, receded.

Fast forward 25 years and the web, through the web browser, is now a platform in its own right, capable of becoming the target of application development. Google is a leader in this new environment. Their recent release of several business applications extends that lead.

Problem is, who’s going to use this sort of software for anything other than dabbling? Probably not many, and for good reason. Even though the web is enabling rich application development, it’s still not rich enough to compete with applications designed to operate natively/locally to a computer. Therefore, Google has some neat technology, but it’s essentially mediocre software that is unreliable (whether by the fault of the client or server) and has sketchy performance. Sound familiar?

Many critics have judged Microsoft pretty harshly, fair or not, for putting a lot of marginal software into the wild. Security of their OS software is notoriously bad, their applications are closed and features are added at a glacial pace. Concepts that are great, and deserve real kudos, get released but remain unimproved thereafter.

I see similar things happening with Google. Google releases application that are interesting and in some cases really fantastic (Gmail anyone?) but then they take forever to improve or finalize those applications. Google is becoming famous as the company that invented the perpetual “beta” release. Also, their focus on Adsense is driving their development in a single dimension. I see there being some attempt to diversify their revenue sources, but not a lot. Selling individual server boxen is not terribly profitable and I hear nothing of their other pay for use/service offerings as real drivers of growth.

I see Google trying to force everything to work a) on the web and b) with Adsense. Sounds like a pretty limiting and limited vision, similar to the limiting vision that has kept Microsoft from being a true driver of massive innovation.

(To be fair, Microsoft has done tremendous amounts of good work. My opinion is simply that they could have done more with themselves in the time they’ve been on top. WinFS, delayed Vista, multiplatform goodness, security neglect - these and more are areas that I feel have been dropped opportunities by MS.)

So that’s it. Google will continue to rise, but in so doing it will try to fit everything into the Google mould/formula. It’s inevitable, and it’s already happening, and it’s going to make Google look a lot like Microsoft in a few years.