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A comment on Wheels up for Waymo as we expand our 24/7 rider-only territories. Parent comment

Re:Wheels up for Waymo as we expand our 24/7 rider-only terr... by kyledrake on Sunday December 18, 2022 @10:36AM (#34038635)
My learned experience with mergers/acquisitions is that it is a genuine skill to pull them off correctly.

In YouTube's case it's more likely that they saved it, IIRC the bandwidth bills and legal threats were getting pretty existential around the time of the purchase.

Being able to pull off being the only company to successfully do self-driving is a similarly masterful execution and I'm not sure how long it's going to take for competitors to catch up to them at this point.

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Re:Wheels up for Waymo as we expand our 24/7 rider-only terr... by ghaff on Sunday December 18, 2022 @11:53AM (#34039538)
>Inheriting those legal problems was a chance they took that could have sunk the entire company in a slightly dumber legal outcome for the status quo of the web, which was still very much in limbo at the time.

Yeah. Smartphones were barely a thing when Google bought YouTube and, more broadly, user-created video wasn't very widespread generally. YouTube's money-losing business, such as it was, mostly consisted of users violating copyright by uploading TV and movie clips.

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