> Google Video, for example, seemed to serve the sole purpose of making me think "dammit, why doesn't the 'Video' tab just take me to YouTube?"

Google Video predated the Youtube acquisition. For me it was a marker of how very large companies suck at innovation. Here was Google, having their lunch stolen by a startup, in epic fashion.

Google Video was also better technically in basically every way— the audio/video sync was better (I preferred it for posting short swing dancing clips), encoding was faster, and seeking and mid-video permalinks were better. Plus, I believe GV had a live streaming feature first.

YouTube still won, largely for the social/commenting/vlogging features, which is part of why it was such a big deal when YouTube users became the basis of Google+ (with its real name policy).

YouTube both won and lost, because it was a startup operating in the legal grey zone. It was long before most content was commercial content, commercials, music videos or other professional content most often clips or full videos of content people did not own copyright for. Sure, many people want to share their amateur content on the island with the most inhabitants. Neither Google other rivals or other startups had the gumption and survivor instinct to play this hand. If Google was the host or already owned YouTube when the DRM issues emerged and were being negotiated the copyright owners would have come after Google even harder, faster and more expensively. I say YouTube lost, because they needed to sell. When Google bought YouTube the business model and risks were better known. Months after Google purchased YouTube Viacom famously sued. By that point publishers were seeing benefits along with the costs.

That's interesting. It never occurred to me whether they were technically better. I always preferred YouTube to Google Video, just from the perspective of someone watching videos - because of the UI/UX of the site and player (didn't use any of the social features).

YouTube was VHS, Google Video was BetaMax, but this time Sony acquired JVC

I just remember the UX of Google Video being really bad.

Most of the google video tech got moved over to youtube anyway.

Why was it "their lunch" ? Back then, Google was a search company which made forays into mail and maps. Android or Chrome hadn't been released yet (and by 2005 probably barely started).

Video hosting is a substantially different product. I don't see why Google should have owned it more than any other web company at the time, including YouTube itself.

Google already owned Blogger at that time, and I think with some hindsight you can say they always had a half-hearted interest in things "social". YouTube has a large social component of course. That is obvious now, but you could have easily imagined something less social back then.

The Blogger acquisition and integration for me is a puzzle wrapped into an enigma. They paid good money for it, then froze it. They weight blogs hosted there very favourably in Search, but there is no push to get users and it emanates an aura of “this product might actually be a walking zombie”. If they don’t value the product, why don’t they push people away? If they value Blogger, why is it so frozen?

This is common theme of Evan Williams startups. He starts a company to build new blogging platform because last one sucked. Enormous amount of head spinning marketing is done to acquire millions of bloggers. Then the company is sold to suckers for few billion dollars. Most talent leaves and the sucker aquirer freezes the product in zombie state. Ev Williams then starts another blog startup because his last one sucked. Next up: Medium.com.

YT had basically won by failing. When they got purchased they had a few weeks of runway left.

Is there a single, major US tech company that hasn’t collaborated with the military?

The whole military runs on Windows, Exchange, Office. AWS runs major data centers for them. RedHat, IBM, Intel ... who hasn’t done work for the military or intelligence apparatus?

Apple?

LOL - "The Pentagon today announced a partnership with 162 companies and universities -- including" ...

Netflix?

I stand corrected.

Netflix and kill?

Snapchat?