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Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

> Are we talking about the same Google here? The one that owns YouTube, which created an entire culture around video streaming online?

they purchased youtube because their own video services was terrible

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YouTube was also _significantly_ smaller when Google purchased it. Perhaps they weren't able to create a properly competing platform, but they've certainly been wildly successful in growing it.

i think they were successful in making it profitable, but whether they were good at growing it is debatable. the founders of youtube complained that they couldnt get the proper talent because google would veto all their hires and force them to take google insiders.

during that time, youtube mostly stagnated in many ways. it failed to develop online streaming and developing original content in the way netflix did even though youtube had access to larger infrastructure and investment from google. even competitors like vine showed some success and innovation, where as youtube is mostly the same thing it was when purchased. they have a lot of users/views, but i do not see any of that attributed to google.

Yea, this is nonsense. YouTube was founded in 2005 and acquired by Google in 2006. It was bought because the brand was better than "Google Video" at the time and that's pretty much it. Just about everything else about its success and state today is completely attributable to Google.

> even competitors like vine showed some success and innovation

what? Vine was shutdown precisely because it wasn't successful...

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