My mother was a banker. She asked a hypothetical question of me, 30 years ago, that I've never been able to answer: "Name for me one company that was better, for the customer or the employees, after a merger."
Let me also be clear that it’s not like it was squeaky clean and friendly prior. But to say it has improved since the acquisition…I’m having a hard time seeing that.
Besides that, what Google provided was hosting infrastructure and legal protection. Otherwise they would have been sued into nothing and couldn't have afforded to serve video.
remember google tried to force that weird google plus login instead?
and now it’s so corporatized/ad filled
Tell me now a believable alternative growth story for Youtube where Google didn't buy it and the service isn't "corporatized" and not losing money.
You can't compare an unprofitable small-scale startup product to what the same product needs to be to make it 1) planet-scale and 2) profitable.
They film themselves burning residential trash and teach others "how to save money at the dump" doing it.
Each one of them pollutes more than an entire city.
I've reported them, because those activities are illegal, and YouTube keeps the videos up.
Google's (and YouTube's) customers are advertisers. Advertisers are certainly better off with the scale and reach that Google juiced YouTube with, and Google earns about $15B annually in revenue from it.
So, I'd say both conditions are met.
The reason I think it was a merger is, that it was a merger.
"The first Mercedes-Benz branded vehicles were produced in 1926, following the merger of Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler's companies into the Daimler-Benz company on 28 June of the same year."
Mercedes was a car name from the Daimlers side of the merger (from a car seller and racing team) - so it was Mercedes-Benz.