YouTube was fine when Google wrote checks and got out of the way. Now Larry and co. have their hands all over it and YT is slowly going to shit... from the G+ spam to the annotation spam and of course you need to sign in to keep them turned off (lol maybe!), to "hey let's make you rebuffer the whole video you just watched" to just horrid performance drops in general to "hey we found a way to make YT comments even worse".

I can't feel that we'd be much better off if MS had decided to lose billions on YouTube along with Bing and Google had pressed ahead with Google Video as a legitimate competitor.

"hey we found a way to make YT comments even worse"

Could they get any worse? Seriously does any normal thinking person really participate and contribute comments in that quagmire? I sometimes I thank Google and Yahoo for creating those honey pots for the internet brain-dead to vent their steam and vitriol, keeping them well away from stuff I like to constructively participate in.

Well, since they are (more) tightly integrated with Google+ you get even more inane one-liners like 'interesting' that somebody posted with sharing the video, and useless banter in conversation threads following these shares.

Actually the comment quality on the videos I watch seems to have improved markedly since the G+ integration...

Coincidence? No clue... Still, all the "OMG G+ will destroy youtube!1!" whining is looking pretty stupid...

I agree... it is still horrible, but it seems to be slightly less horrible now.

I always thought of them as the "song ID" section for artsy videos, because that's what they used to be good for. Now even that is broken.

I'd love to see Nest integrated with Google+.

"OMG LOL your house is burning down."

Was just noting today how crappy youtube has become. Agree with you totally.

+1,000,000

comments, ads, channels, even the way the video buffers is annoying smfh

while its hard to argue with your point. YT is a huge revenue generating product. Now more than ever Google is probably being pressured by the "content owners" and trying to balance the need for creators to market their channels and helping them grow through questionable content. I think with a mature, product like YT its understandable.

I understand the ads, and they blocking videos just because somebody passed aroung listenning to a music. I don't care about comments at all, thus I don't even know how they changed...

But what I'm unable to accept is why the client won't let me buffer a video and erases everything just as soon as it's diplayed on the screen. It does not make downloading the content any harder - all it does is making me download the videos, whatch them and delete, because the official player sucks.

Agree , I generally look forward to vimeo as an alternative

While I agree with the statement, lately Google's action has been concerning (with things like Reader, Google+ push, and what not).

I just don't want to see Google dominating the world. Competition is nice.

Are you implying that google did a disservice to the competition by creating a desire for a product and then retiring it with months of warning for competitors to develop their product and attract google's large user base while allowing users to easily migrate their information to those services?

Google did a disservice by creating a free service with which other companies (who need to make a profit) couldn't compete. The only way to make any money in the RSS space was to create something that interfaced with Google Reader (which I know because I spent a lot of time trying to find a good one that didn't).

There are parallels to the Internet Explorer/Netscape issue. Google provided a free service to everyone, killing any good paid services/products (which didn't integrate with Google Reader), except instead of taking advantage of their monopoly they just threw it away.

Now you have companies like Reeder, with a sufficiently large user base, who have to not only scramble to provide their own backend (or integrate with someone else's), but also scale it to the appropriate number of users literally overnight, which is not necessarily an easy task for a company which has, so far, only needed to have client-side developers (which is why most client apps, like Reeder, moved to using some other company for their backend instead of writing their own).

There was certainly no malicious intent, but they basically crushed an entire market and then abandoned it.

"literally overnight"

3.5 months.

Also, you'll be hard-pressed to find much upward pressure beyond free on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators

> There are parallels to the Internet Explorer/Netscape issue. Google provided a free service to everyone, killing any good paid services/products (which didn't integrate with Google Reader), except instead of taking advantage of their monopoly they just threw it away.

"except instead of taking advantage of their monopoly". Woww way to telegraph the fact that you completely misunderstood the Internet Explorer/Netscape issue. Parallels with IE/Netscape are meaningless if the monopoly _gets thrown away_.

That is actually a very good point. With all the lamenting of Google Reader sunsetting, positive externalities are ignored. And they are plentiful: multiple startups have springed up to compete for new audience, established companies like Feedly have experienced an influx of users and the landscape generally became much more competitive.

In the warsaw circle countries, we had a joke (and I say it as a fairly hardline socialist) that „communism heroically solves the problems it created”.

Sounds like the case.

I agree with vdaniuk, that it is a good point. It changed my mind a bit.

On consideration, I'm a big fan of Google, Apple and Amazon. The thing that makes me (and probably others) nervous about all three is that they are too big. For instance, a monopolist strategy (Microsoft style) might appear someday.

Yes and we can find tons of examples where they haven't done well, e.g. Jaiku which they pretty much threw away, Dodgeball which let the founders leave in anger and got them to found Foursquare outside of Google etc...

You're looking at this the wrong way. Google acquisitions tend to go two ways: talent acquisition, or hitting for homeruns. Is it worth it to Google if they buy a Jaiku and a Dodgeball and a bunch of other relatively small companies and essentially whiff, then knock it out of the park when they buy an Android or a YouTube? Short termers always back, but when you look back over the last five years the overall strategy has been sound.

With specific regards to Foursquare: note that the founder left to do Foursquare, and they're floundering right now. Maybe the vision was never sound to begin with.

Y!?

Oh, not Y! (although some have speculated that Mayer move was a reverse-acquisition)

Sarcasm aside? I think the case could be made that those products have grown in public perception, but also suffered at the same time very definitely because of Google influence. Take the second comment ever by one of the YouTube founders? https://www.youtube.com/user/jawed/ for a quick example

One can object to Google's Plussification of everything, but it's not like the quality of Youtube comments have been harmed. (In fact these XKCD comics may be obsolete now: https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+comments+site%3Axkcd... ) And Youtube overall has done quite well.

Android would have gone nowhere without being acquired, since OEMs and carriers wouldn't talk to such a small company.

Yes it gives you traction, when otherwise people might not have heard of you, but you also lose your identity more than ever. In the past when Google acquired something it was like "Yay! Google!" now it is like "Yay that company! And sorry." Actually the top comment in this thread nailed my immediate feelings pretty well.

(