Wow. 1.6 billion dollars. Again - 1.6 billion dollars. That was how much Google paid to acquire YouTube.
The amazing fact is that it took Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the founders of YouTube, just 19 months to get to this point!
That's the wet dream of every guy and girl who ever dreamed about opening its own business.
The really cool thing about this is the fact that when you look at YouTube today you got to ask yourself, how the hell no one has done it before...
I guess that was the thing that always fascinated me about the Internet, even (and maybe more) in the early days. The fact that a person with a good idea and notepad has the potential to change the world. What other industry can give you this chance??
In a personal note, I got to admit that I'm sorry it was Google and not Yahoo that acquired YouTube.
I think that Yahoo is one of the only "big guys" that actually understand the new community concept. Their new products like Yahoo Travel and Yahoo music are just awesome, and they really know hot to get the social networking concept to work for them.
Meanwhile, as much as I appreciate Google as a search engine, I'm disappointed from all the other applications the company has developed.
It seems that Google is trying so much to shoot to all directions, that no one of their products is really getting as good as it should have been. Too many times they lunch something new and exciting and then "forget" to update it for months.
Even Gmail, which I use quite a lot, stayed almost the same for such a long time. I hope that the fact that YouTube should stay independent will keep them from going on the same lane.
