If Google were playing chess I think they just said “check.�

[Don]

Google to Yahoo and Microsoft: the $1.65 billion was worth it Ahh, now you all understand what I meant when I said YouTube is a moat, not a revenue generator. By putting YouTube results into Google’s main engine Google ensures it will have better searches than Yahoo and Microsoft (who were, truth be told, getting damn close to matching Google’s quality). And it does it in a way that Yahoo and Microsoft will not be willing to match. Seriously, can you see an executive at Microsoft advocating putting YouTube videos into Microsoft’s search results? I can’t. That’d be the equivilent of sending traffic to a competitor. It’d be what I advocate at this point, but that explains why I am a stupid blogger and not some multi-millionaire executive. Anyway, Google just distanced themselves from Yahoo and Microsoft. And they just provided a way to monetize YouTube videos. I love Google’s strategy. It continues to mess with Microsoft’s strategy. Microsoft still treats each team as something that must make money. Google doesn’t do that. They didn’t care one bit that YouTube didn’t have any revenues. They knew that there’s other ways to make money off of YouTube than to force YouTube to monetize on its own. Truth be told even I didn’t quite understand just what an impact that the YouTube purchase would have. It’s all very clear now. It also is even more worth putting up with billions of dollars of lawsuits. If I were at Microsoft now I don’t know what I’d be advocating. Ray Ozzie really has his work cut out for him. Google just put Microsoft’s Internet strategy in a box. It also explains why Microsoft has put so much effort into Silverlight lately (they need that to build a platform to get out of the box) and, might even explain why the lawyers are sabre rattling about open source. The execs at Microsoft don’t like being put into boxes. That isn’t a place they’ve ever been before. If Google were playing chess I think they just said “check.†And you wonder why the rest of the industry is talking about FOG (Fear of Google)? Exactly.

[Holysmoke]

Re: Forum topic Google is going to rule the net. They are good. Think about it. It is much much harder to switch from one operating system to another. Still, how often have you heard of people shifting from Windows to Mac, or Linux, etc. Compare that to the number of times you've heard somebody shifting his search engine from Google to Microsoft... MS should stick to OS.