[HN Gopher] Larry Page: "I think we should look into acquiring Y...
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Larry Page: "I think we should look into acquiring YouTube" (2005)
Author : ent101
Score : 289 points
Date : 2021-09-05 13:50 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| axegon_ wrote:
| Strange thought: up until 2010-11 Vimeo was a vastly superior
| platform in terms of service quality(then Google stepped up the
| game of course). But it does make me wonder what would have
| happened if Google had bought Vimeo instead and where would
| either be today
| skizm wrote:
| YouTube's primary value add for me is music remixes and covers
| that can't legally make it to Spotify / Apple music / etc., but
| skirt around the DMCA takedowns. I try and use it as my primary
| driver for music but the recommendation engine is just terrible.
| I listen to days of classic rock and most of my recommendations
| are still centered around that one EDM song I listened to a week
| ago. Probably because the ratio of people playing EDM videos with
| sexy thumbnails to people "watching" classic rock lyric videos is
| very high. Oh well.
| rambambram wrote:
| Second this. Youtube works very well as my music discovery
| medium. The 'long tail' on there is just so rich of nice music.
| And indeed, I can keep clicking that scarce house song in my
| recommended videos, but the algo still gives me mostly
| melancholic Romanian deeptechno or something. Although that
| seems to got a little better after getting rid of all the ads -
| and meanwhile other tracking shit - by using uBlock.
| [deleted]
| tptacek wrote:
| Small world. Peter Chane was the product manager at the
| (extremely) doomed startup I cofounded '99-'01. Never would have
| thought that he'd go on just a couple years later to try to talk
| Google out of buying Youtube. :)
|
| (Chane was much better at his job at that company than I was at
| mine, just for the record.)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Does anyone remember the Revver video site the emails refer to?
| habibur wrote:
| > Gustimated price tag would be $10-15m.
|
| YouTube finally sold for $1b to google. And at that time everyone
| felt that was an unjustifiable price for a company that was
| burning millions per month on bandwidth and possibly will run out
| of cash any time.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| And now it generates 15 billion per year.
| pcurve wrote:
| Considering it's de facto global video sharing platform the
| fact that it's only 15 billion per year is surprising and
| makes me uneasy about equity valuation in general in tech
| space
| dannyw wrote:
| Interest rates are nearly 0%, it's no surprise to see crazy
| multiples.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Looks like it's closer to 20B in 2020 but it's also got a
| different type of competition now (tiktok, like a dozen
| first class streaming subscriptions & more lower tier
| options).
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Isn't that 15 years later with a lot of effort and google's
| brand and muscle? I wonder how its remaining competitors like
| vimeo are doing.
| summerlight wrote:
| Google has invested a lot on its computing infrastructure (I
| guess ~20B per quarter nowadays?) and a large part of this
| should be attributed to YT given the heavy computational
| nature of video processing. I wouldn't be surprised if
| cumulative OpEx on YT is several tens of billions after the
| acquisition.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Talking about bandwidth, aren't we talking anymore about how
| all those big services clog the pipes by delivering content
| that users want instead of small websites who deliver content
| that users want, and how this is unfair and how we should tax
| the hell of Youtube and Facebook and Netflix for being most of
| the bandwidth that is consumed?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes but the instant Google bought them they stopped burning
| millions on bandwidth, because even at that time Google had
| more latent fiber than anyone else. As I've said here dozens of
| times _hardware_ has been the key to Google 's success. Fiber
| in the ground is a big part of it.
| the-rc wrote:
| YouTube had peering agreements in place even before the
| acquisition. And the instant the contract was signed,
| Google's fiber wasn't near YT's (then) five-six locations, so
| it was of little use. Actually, in November 2006 YT had a lot
| more (frontend) egress bandwidth than Google, whose dark
| fiber was mostly for its internal backbone. It took a couple
| of years before there was an unified CDN, at which point YT
| had already grown many times over.
| blihp wrote:
| A bigger concern was that by the time of the acquisition it was
| clear that Google was buying a legal mess in the form of
| lawsuits that were spinning up from various Hollywood media
| companies. What wasn't clear (to many of us on the outside, at
| least) was that Google was prepared to deal with that and not
| go broke doing so.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I was at Google during this period, and did a lot of work with YT
| ads, 2009-2010. Their backend was still Python then; I have no
| idea about now.
|
| Memory: I was over there and someone was introducing me to a
| group of folks and said "he's from Google." I spread my hands
| around and said "we're ALL from Google."
|
| She said, "No, this is YouTube."
| BurningFrog wrote:
| At the time Google tended to destroy companies they bought by
| insisting they rewrite their product using Google
| infrastructure.
|
| By the time that was complete, the product had died.
|
| For some reason, YouTube was allowed to keep their
| infrastructure.
| summerlight wrote:
| > By the time that was complete, the product had died.
|
| Perhaps giving a list of those dead products would be helpful
| for discussions, modulo those products with merely brand
| changes.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Not sure if this is what you looking for but look here
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| mattrick wrote:
| Maybe because they were productive in their own environment
| (like the email mentioned)? Might be an "if it ain't broke
| don't fix it" mentality, but I imagine that would've also
| applied to many other companies they acquired.
| nostrademons wrote:
| YouTube did rewrite on Google infrastructure - there was a
| paper they published c. 2008 about how they were leveraging
| Google's cloud to scale. It was largely back-end stuff; IIRC
| they moved from MySQL to BigTable, adopted Google's blobstore
| & CDN, integrated with Google's machine-learning systems,
| etc. They were allowed to _choose_ which parts of Google 's
| infrastructure they wanted, though. AFAIK the front-end was
| still Python when I left Google the first time in 2014, and
| it wouldn't surprise me if it still is now.
| fred256 wrote:
| "adopted Google's [...] CDN"
|
| Google's CDN was largely written _for_ YouTube.
| izgzhen wrote:
| It is mostly Java now. Backend ones are migrated to C++
| zigradett wrote:
| "The front-end was Python..."
|
| "The back-end was Python... ...."
|
| okay.
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Frontend at Google means something like an HTTP server,
| not a JavaScript app. Backend is e.g. your API server.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| We do have a contradiction here, if that's what you're
| saying.
|
| I was not in YT. I was only _told_ their backend was
| Python by people who were. I can 't explain that paper OP
| saw. Could be it reflected reality and I'm wrong; could
| be it was only a design.
|
| I do know for a fact that they still had their own
| experiment infrastructure, which does suggest that the
| backend was still legacy.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I was also not in YT (was in Search from 09-14), but a
| bunch of my coworkers went over to work there around
| '10-11. I read the paper before joining Google; I think
| it came out in 07 or 08.
|
| There might also be a lot of confusion over "backend" vs.
| "frontend" terminology. Like the other poster mentioned,
| "frontend" at Google usually means the webserver and
| sometimes extends back to various application-level
| services. Basically everything that involves user
| interaction. Experiment infrastructure has been part of
| the frontend in every system I've worked with at Google
| (which now includes Search, Google+, GFiber, Doodles,
| AndroidTV, and Assistant), though the flags often get
| plumbed back to backends to alter behavior there.
|
| By "backend" I mean the storage & offline processing
| areas. BigTable, Colossus, MapReduce, various blob
| stores, training machine-learning models, etc. This is
| the part of YT that (in my understanding) was rewritten
| to use Google technologies.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I remember going to a talk by the Dodgeball founders, a
| recent acquisition, and thinking "these guys are never going
| to make it at Google." I was right.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/news/dodgeball-founders-quit-google/
| izgzhen wrote:
| YT is migrating more and more low-level infra to Google wide
| support now. But many core "middleware" infra is still
| maintained in-house.
| gnodar wrote:
| Interesting, if unsurprising, to see that a large factor in the
| interest in YouTube was based purely on location, as well as
| knowledge of the people working there, their backgrounds, and who
| specifically they were funded by.
|
| Where you are and who you know often outweighs having the best
| product, features, etc.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| This was because, in the emails at that time, they thought it
| would be a 10-15M acqui-hire and to "block yahoo" purchase
| only.
| lumost wrote:
| All else being equal, Those closest to the money stream are the
| most likely to succeed.
| wilsynet wrote:
| I didn't get that at all. They talked about the funding round
| as a signal for what the asking price might be, and then "Mike
| from Sequoia" because they know Mike and therefore know which
| partner at Sequoia to reach out to broker a conversation.
|
| As for location. Totally. It was likely critical.
|
| Disclosure: I work at Google.
| zeroxfe wrote:
| These very commonly considered success-probability multipliers
| and derisking factors -- at this stage, the makeup, expertise,
| and reputations of the individuals leading a company are the
| biggest success factors. Even if the acquisition fails, having
| a strong (and nearby) team adds a lot of value to the acquirer.
| devops000 wrote:
| How they could have such emails?
| Jxl180 wrote:
| These are in the public record from the anti-trust case against
| Google.
| devops000 wrote:
| Ok, I don't know why I have been down voted for this
| question.
| tomdell wrote:
| YouTube blew my mind in 2005. Obviously it isn't practical for a
| business to lose money forever, but it felt so new and cool when
| there were no ads.
| ng12 wrote:
| Same. It's crazy to think people just a few years younger than
| me probably don't remember a time where there was almost no
| video on the web.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I uploaded my first video in late 2005, it's still up there.
|
| I remember Google video was up around that time, and IIRC, the
| only true competitor. It should be mentioned that back then,
| the only ting that mattered to me was whether or not you could
| upload videos, and the site had a video player.
|
| Pre-2005, I can honestly only remember downloading video files
| directly off websites, and then play them with some video
| player. I think I used Opera back then, and I think Opera
| supported some video players - but it was a real hassle, with
| the different video formats.
|
| I also remember that before youtube etc., unless you had your
| own server or paid hosting, we'd use our "free" 5/10/15 MB
| hosting that came your ISP gave you, or other hosting sites
| provided (they'd usually have some free tier with a couple of
| free megs).
|
| What we did, was to sign up for multiple such sites, so that
| we'd in effect get like 100/200 megs of hosting. Sometimes we'd
| have to chop up the files into multiple zip files, and
| distribute them over those websites.
|
| Unfortunately, a lot of these smaller hosting sites disappeared
| over the years, and a lot of files got lost forever.
|
| But yeah, when youtube etc. hit the scene, it was pretty much
| an overnight revolution. All the pains of sharing / hosting
| videos were gone.
| ineedasername wrote:
| So basically the only reason they were considering YouTube was to
| either deny it to their competition, or force their competition
| to pay more for it.
|
| It sounds like they expected it to die on a backroom shelf
| somewhere if they made the purchase. This seems anti-competitive
| behavior even during what might otherwise be viewed as their
| "don't be evil" phase. They didn't see it as valuable for their
| own needs, they just didn't want it to grow into competition
| itself or via another competitor and so considered buying it to
| let it die.
| jasode wrote:
| _> It sounds like they expected it to die on a backroom shelf
| somewhere if they made the purchase. This seems anti-
| competitive behavior [...] They didn't see it as valuable for
| their own needs,_
|
| I think you're reading too much conspiracy motive into Larry's
| terse email.
|
| Based on various interviews, Susan Wojcicki was head of Google
| Video at the time and she acknowledged they were losing against
| the upstart Youtube. She originally thought Google Video would
| succeed because Google was "playing nice" by negotiating _legal
| licenses_ with broadcasters like NBC whereas Youtube was just a
| bunch of pirated content.
|
| It was a big risk to acquire Youtube because the Viacom piracy
| lawsuit was looming. Google decided they could handle it and
| went ahead with the acquisition. They saw the value in Youtube
| and didn't have any intention of killing it.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Based on these emails, the very _first_ consideration that
| sparked their interest-- _no matter what came later_ -- was
| to deny it to their competition or drive up the price.
|
| Just because upon investigation, YouTube actually seemed to
| have some value does not negate the fact that their _first_
| motive was based upon limiting competition.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Actually it seems like gp is reading all the emails that came
| before Larry's
| [deleted]
| simonh wrote:
| One of them wrote something like that, and seemed against the
| idea on that basis because there were other options Yahoo could
| go for. That was basically an argument for not doing the deal
| because it would only, maybe have those effects, but that
| wasn't the opinion of the others. Ultimately that's not why
| they bought them anyway. So no, not really.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _Ultimately that's not why they bought them anyway. So no,
| not really_
|
| That's not relevant to the fact that limiting competition was
| their _very first consideration_.
|
| And other competitors were seen as lesser value because of
| their location, not to mention the fact that the reply to
| that argument was that just talking to them would still hurt
| competition by making any acquisition more expensive.
|
| Just because Google ultimately found YouTube to be valuable
| doesn't change the fact that their first motive was to limit
| competition.
| wilsynet wrote:
| I think you're mis-reading the thread. Jeff Huber says YouTube
| are cranking features, but their backend probably won't scale
| and they don't have good monetization. That ultimately ends up
| being what they do -- after acquiring YouTube, they re-built it
| using Google's distributed systems infrastructure and software.
| And the monetization model today is in fact (mostly) ads.
|
| What you then see in the thread is someone else saying: yeah
| we're going to catch up, we just need a couple of more devs.
|
| And then the counterpoint that well, even if Google doesn't end
| up doing it, at least it makes it harder for Yahoo.
|
| The original motivation isn't just to make it harder for Yahoo.
| It's that Huber wants to bring these people on board because
| they are really good at innovating, and Google can help make it
| really successful. But there was some pushback, and then other
| reasons were presented to continue with the conversation.
|
| At these companies (any company?), sometimes to get what you
| want you have to present a diverse set of reasons, even if only
| one of them is the principal reason why you want to do
| something.
|
| Note: I work for Google.
| ineedasername wrote:
| [Edit: I see the feature quote now] I don't see it.
|
| They're saying it's nothing special-- they're not aware of a
| significant talent pool and there are "no big video brains".
|
| From there, the first two reasons stated for actual
| consideration in acquiring YouTube are as a defense or
| because even talking to them will make it more expensive for
| someone else to acquire them.
| cplex wrote:
| The second sentence. Sounds like you maybe missed the first
| screenshot?
| ineedasername wrote:
| I did miss it, thanks. I avoid Twitter, so browsing it on
| a phone makes it easy (for me) to miss how they stacked
| the images.
|
| But that doesn't change much about this story: what does
| it matter that they note features-- already on Google's
| roadmap-- when they then, as their stated reason for
| actually buying YouTube, is as a defensive move?
|
| Basically: "YouTube has some nice features but we're
| already building them and just want the company so Yahoo
| can't have them."
|
| That doesn't make this picture look any better for
| Google.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Basically: "YouTube has some nice features but we're
| already building them and just want the company so Yahoo
| can't have them."
|
| That's not what it says. If you want to go that basic:
|
| "Youtube is doing better at innovating here than us, but
| we have some stuff they don't, and if we acquired them
| we'd get the best of both worlds and deny it to Yahoo"
| sjg007 wrote:
| I've worked at companies where people really dislike things
| not invented here. I don't get it, if you can acquire
| technology you should.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Wow, thank god we had the geniuses at Google to give them
| their unique monetization model: ads!
|
| I don't get it, that first paragraph describes just about
| every startup ever. And I'm sure had Yahoo acquired it, it
| would have been "re-built using Yahoo's distributed systems
| infrastructure and software". Don't you know it, they would
| have updated the letterhead too!
| da_chicken wrote:
| > Wow, thank god we had the geniuses at Google to give them
| their unique monetization model: ads!
|
| I think you're forgetting the state of the web in 2005.
|
| The tech to do on the fly pre-roll and mid-roll ads in an
| existing video didn't exist in 2005, there was no
| significant market for video advertising on the web in
| 2005, and web browsers could not play video at all. It was
| all plugin based. There was no streaming standard. There
| was no way to circumvent banner ad blocking, too. Sure,
| that new thing Web 2.0 might help, and XHTML 2 sounds
| promising, but it's not there yet. To top it off, the main
| way most users -- even Americans -- connected to the
| internet in 2005 was still dial-up! So you're a niche
| market, too.
|
| If your model is "just use ads" then the 2005 response is
| "okay, but how do you sell dynamic ad views in videos with
| maybe a couple thousand views? And how do they work?"
| adventured wrote:
| YouTube was going to go bankrupt without a large reservoir
| of funds.
|
| YouTube would have suffered a far worse fate in the hands
| of the extra special incompetent Yahoo organization.
|
| While I might like to see YouTube spun out of Google,
| Google is the primary reason it survived. Along with
| bleeding to death financially as one likely outcome,
| YouTube was going to get sued into oblivion. Google
| shielded them in terms of liability because Google was
| fearsome enough to intimidate the overly lawsuit-happy
| savages in Hollywood and the music industry. That delayed
| the reckoning that was coming for YouTube in regards to the
| content on their platform that was under copyright by major
| media publishers (music in particular). There were dozens
| of prominent articles written about that specific context
| back in those years.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Another YouTube would have sprung up out of the ashes,
| the idea is just too good.
| capableweb wrote:
| It seems fairly obvious that what the people are discussing
| in the linked email thread is anti competitive behavior. Here
| are some excerpts:
|
| > and were thinking about a acq with Yahoo
|
| > and it would be nice for y! not to have them
|
| > their content quality is worse than ours ... if we pick
| them up it would be defensive vs yahoo
|
| > I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it
| more expensive for Yahoo
|
| You don't make statements like that and then explain it with
| "It didn't seem like they would scale and we don't have
| enough devs". The decision on if the buy YouTube or not (or
| another video company), was clearly influenced by the "risk"
| of Yahoo buying the very same company.
| code_duck wrote:
| Anti-competitive behavior is the normal way businesses
| operate. It only becomes notable or illegal when they have
| a monopoly position, which I don't believe describes Google
| in 2005.
| sokoloff wrote:
| When does competition become anti-competitive? If I see a
| promising startup in my space with challenges ahead, it
| seems reasonable to consider many different angles,
| including whether I can help them succeed and whether a
| competitor could also help them succeed (or they could help
| a competitor).
|
| Given that Y! was considering buying YouTube, the
| probability that a similar set of emails was written on
| Yahoo's end is approximately 1.
|
| IMO, that's because they were also competing with Google.
| Is everyone in that market acting anti-competitively? What
| would that even mean (absent collusion)?
| after_care wrote:
| It means the purpose of Google's acquisition was to limit
| the market offerings of Yahoo.
| plandis wrote:
| That doesn't sound like _the_ purpose of the acquisition,
| it was one of the arguments in the conversation but not
| the sole reason.
|
| Given that YouTube has not been killed and Google has
| heavily invested in it and there were some legal
| minefields with Youtubes content early on that Google
| would then take on, I think it's reasonable to conclude
| that they didn't acquire it just to mess with Yahoo
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That would be clearcut if they had acquired YT and then
| promptly buried it. Instead, they invested in it
| massively, and built it over several years into a
| profitable aspect of their business. That doesn't look
| "anti-competitive" to me (given the usual assumptions of
| 21st century US capitalism).
| adventured wrote:
| This thread is hilarious.
|
| Google only generates revenue to deny their competition
| that money! Their sole reason to exist is to be anti-
| competitive! Every time they breathe they're being anti-
| competitive.
| ineedasername wrote:
| It's not like we have to choose: Google and Yahoo can
| both have been anti-competitive, so what does it matter
| if Yahoo did, or didn't, consider things from the same
| angle?
|
| They are literally talking about making a decision on the
| basis of eliminating a competitor from the market via a
| purchase they thought might have little/no other value. I
| think that is a reasonable working definition for
| examples if anti-competitive behavior.
| judge2020 wrote:
| If anticompetitive behavior could simply be considered
| "purchasing companies of which you might compete with"
| we'd see a lot more antitrust lawsuits.
| ineedasername wrote:
| You're assuming anti-competitive behavior doesn't exist
| based on the premise that it's not prosecuted more often
| but that is flawed logic. Anti-competitive behavior and
| lack of prosection are not mutually exclusive.
|
| We don't see antitrust lawsuits for a variety of reasons.
| One of which is that they are extremely resource
| intensive to fight since by definition they tend to be
| fought against massive corporations. When the feds can go
| after 50 other cases for the cost of going after a single
| massive company, that's a hard sell.
|
| As to purchasing a competitor: Sure, if you're purchasing
| it because it adds to your capabilities then it seems
| fairly straightforward. That's not what we see here.
| Here, we have an example of purchasing them when, at this
| stage, Google saw little or no value in it _except_ as a
| means to limit competition.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I'm saying we only know when behavior is anticompetitive,
| in the sense that someone undoubtedly acted in a way that
| violates US antitrust laws, when it's ruled as such in
| court. You can have an opinion for if some act is
| anticompetitive behavior, but you can't allude to that as
| fact or create a "reasonable working definition" when
| such criteria is already writ in law.
| jasode wrote:
| _> As to purchasing a competitor: Sure, if you're
| purchasing it because it adds to your capabilities then
| it seems fairly straightforward. That's not what we see
| here. Here, we have an example of purchasing them when,
| at this stage, Google saw little or no value in it except
| as a means to limit competition._
|
| You're interpreting the email screenshots incorrectly. I
| think you need to carefully re-read them _and mentally
| note that there are _2_ different people_ expressing 2
| different opinions: Jeff Huber & Peter Chane.
|
| - Jeff Huber (Google Ads team): he initially brings up
| the question about a Youtube acquisition and sees them as
| _additive_ to Google because he sees their team iterating
| on new features faster. He perceives the Youtube team as
| a "passionate" bunch. He also sees value in getting
| Youtube's assets and existing deals if Google buys them.
| Jeff sees synergy with buying them because he predicts
| that Youtube will eventually need a more scalable backend
| (think of Google's big datacenters) -- and
| monetization... and as a convenient coincidence... Jeff
| is in the ads team.
|
| - Peter Chane (Google Video team): he pushes back because
| he thinks his Google Video team will eventually build the
| same Youtube features anyway by 4th quarter. He's the one
| who wrote Google acquisition of Youtube purchase would be
| "defensive".
|
| You're giving too much weight to one person's opinion
| (Peter Chane). However, PC is not the ultimate decision
| maker for Google to buy Youtube.
|
| Maybe we can use some common sense about Peter Chane's
| perspective. If Peter were to wholeheartedly agree with
| Jeff Huber, that would mean.... _he 's admitting that he
| & his team are not competing as well as those Youtube
| guys_. So it would be understandable _human nature_ for
| him to think the Youtube acquisition would accomplish
| nothing but take them away from Yahoo.
|
| It looks like Jeff Huber (and later Susan Wojcicki)
| championed buying Youtube because of the value there. It
| seems that Peter Chane's opinion was discounted or
| ignored. You don't have war meetings about the risks of
| fighting the multi-million dollar lawsuit with Viacom as
| a consequence of buying Youtube, and then subsidizing
| Youtube's money-losing business for years if you saw no
| value in them.
| pjscott wrote:
| Well said. And as Peter Chane himself noted in one of
| those emails, "there are 20 more sites like this that
| Yahoo could go out and buy". In order for Google to
| effectively gobble up the competition, they would need to
| go on a video site acquisition spree far beyond YouTube
| -- and they didn't. From their behavior, it really does
| look like Google was buying YouTube because they thought
| the two companies would complement each other.
| cavisne wrote:
| It reads more like persuading people to go ahead with the
| acquisition without saying the reality (the dev team was
| way behind).
| nova22033 wrote:
| From Chris Sacca's reply
|
| https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1433947735640715271
|
| Third, Google was often a place that ascribed little value to
| people who didn't have the right degrees and right coding
| pedigree. For years, the company ignored @ev and the Blogger
| team. Hell, they still checked all of our SAT scores back then.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| "Their content quality is worse than ours. They seem focused on
| home video/community space while we want to be more like
| iTunes/TV"
|
| 16 years later, home video is still the core value of YouTube,
| yet they are still trying to push overproduced shows and TV while
| mistreating original creators.
|
| It's literally killing the golden goose.
| doopy1 wrote:
| Is it really home video if a DIY youtuber spends 10's of
| thousands of dollars on a setup to have high quality production
| value?
| arnaudsm wrote:
| If it's at home, yes. They still have their core values :
| independence, relatability and risk-taking.
| mdoms wrote:
| The overproduction of "home content" is killing it for me. As
| soon as Youtubers get a whiff of success suddenly all of the
| authenticity drops out of the channel and absolutely everything
| becomes sponsored content.
| brandnewlow wrote:
| Advertisers of note strongly prefer to put their ads next to
| the second type of content, not the first.
| sorenjan wrote:
| > 16 years later, home video is still the core value of YouTube
|
| Is it? I guess it depends on what you mean by home video. Is it
| "Me at the zoo"[0], or independent content creators like
| PewDiePie or Veratassium? Compared to Hollywood most if not all
| Youtube channels are completely different, but when I think of
| home video and early Youtube I think of personal family trips,
| not NileRed.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
| PKop wrote:
| "Home video/community space" obviously encompasses
| independent content creators, wherever and whatever they're
| creating. I mean, 90% of PewDiePie's videos are him at home.
| Why does the venue of a zoo define the category? In any case,
| independent creators going out in the world, zoos or
| elsewhere, creating content is representative of the divide
| between big studio content and independents.
| sorenjan wrote:
| It's a matter of target audience. Maybe I've misunderstood
| something, but I thought home videos where made for friends
| and family, not millions of people.
| krisoft wrote:
| I think you misunderstand the difference between "Me at the
| zoo" guy and Veratassium. It's not that one is at the zoo
| while the other isn't. :)
|
| The dude in the zoo video is dab smack in the middle of
| what i would call "home video". Some person with a video
| recoding device points it at their life withouth much
| thinking about what is that they want to say or how. It's
| clearly not a nature documentary, though there are
| elephants on the picture.
|
| Veratassium videos are much more intentional. The content
| creator clearly has thought about what they want to talk
| about, and how they want to talk about it. They hired a
| camera person and very often special cameras or drones to
| shoot the best footage to illustrate the content. Each
| video is a mini documentary about a fascinating topic, with
| expert interviews, experiments and models.
|
| I think it is a disservice to call this second type of
| video "home video". Doesn't make sense to mix these two
| together in any sense of the word.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| *Veritasium, as in Veritas latin for truth, hence an element
| of truth
| nicbou wrote:
| Even in the "people at home" category, all the good channels
| I can think of have very high quality. They just happen to be
| about a person talking on or off-camera. AvE and This Old
| Tony come to mind.
| afarrell wrote:
| s/literally/directly/
|
| The word "literally" has no synonyms and if it dies it will
| leave a massive lexical gap.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| metaphorically. I assume no geese were killed in that comment
| kzrdude wrote:
| The word verbatim is admittedly a bit latin-tasting, but
| doesn't it literally mean the same thing? :)
| TheDong wrote:
| I do not believe that it does.
|
| Literally is used to distinguish figurative speech from
| literal speech, while verbatim is used to distinguish exact
| wording from paraphrasing.
|
| For example, if I had temporarily lost my voice and
| couldn't talk, and someone texted "want to call", if I
| replied "I can't talk right now", they would assume I meant
| I was busy, but if I replied "I literally can't talk right
| now", that would accurately convey that I was in situation
| where talking wasn't possible, not merely busy. "I verbatim
| can't talk right now" is nonsense.
| co2benzoate wrote:
| 'Nonfiguratively' would work.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| and in our era, "disfiguratively", "unfiguratively" and
| "infiguratively" would likely make an appearance ...
| wyldfire wrote:
| Are you afraid for the expressiveness of future English
| speakers? Fear not, if the word 'literally' no longer had its
| meaning we'd make a new one to take its place.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| The problem is, if I want to use the term "literally" in a
| literal sense now, nobody will recognize its literal
| meaning, and everybody will assume it's being used
| metaphorically. You literally can't use "literally" in the
| literal sense of the term anymore.
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| Couldn't you say "in the literal sense"? Until the word
| treadmill claims that too of course.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Frankly, too bad. There is no meaningful resistance to
| this change in language. You can't use the word "awesome"
| to mean "deeply terrifying" in almost any context anymore
| and that is okay.
| afarrell wrote:
| That is okay because you can use the phrase "deeply
| terrifying". Languages change in general. I'm fine with
| that.
|
| This specific change literally has had me pacing back and
| forth in distress before.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| But you can't use the phrase "quite literally"? or "in a
| very literal sense of the word", or some variation of
| those?
|
| If this is what has you pacing in distress, I'm envious.
| afarrell wrote:
| > I'm envious
|
| Well I'm also getting divorced, for reasons that aren't
| entirely unrelated to literal communication.
| co2benzoate wrote:
| Then use the word nonfiguratively instead of literally.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Meanwhile, natural language isn't formal language, and
| people understand meanings of statements just as much as
| they did yesterday.
| afarrell wrote:
| > and people understand meanings of statements just as
| much as they did yesterday.
|
| This is the underlying source of my distress: the fear
| that my ability to understand and be understood by people
| will remain as it is.
| Stupulous wrote:
| If people raise objections, that suggests that they are
| having issues with understanding. I know I've been
| confused by it before, and I usually feel compelled to
| use modifiers to distinguish between 'literally millions'
| and 'actually, no-exaggeration, literally millions' when
| I want to be understood.
|
| That doesn't necessarily mean we're moving in the wrong
| direction. Language evolves to satisfy speakers'
| criteria, so it will gradually improve median utility.
| But any change is going to have cost, and confusion could
| be the price we pay for progress.
|
| Alternately, you can imagine a situation where 1% of the
| population derives a huge amount of utility from a word,
| while 99% only get a small benefit from another
| definition. Improvements to the median in that scenario
| can have negative consequences in aggregate. Or you can
| see that this particular usage has been confusing people
| for a hundred years, and the cost of change may outweigh
| any potential benefit.
|
| I think the position that natural language will just take
| care of itself is just a touch hand-wavey. Human
| interests and linguistic-evolutionary movement are often
| coaligned, but sometimes diverge- the same as with human
| interests and economic growth.
| selestify wrote:
| > I think the position that natural language will just
| take care of itself is just a touch hand-wavey.
|
| Why not? It's done just that for countless millenia.
| Cavemen without Ph.D.'s in linguistics managed to develop
| languages for communication just fine.
|
| Now, they could be further optimized, sure. But the
| default of taking no conscious action at all has
| historically worked out just fine for linguistic
| evolution.
| Stupulous wrote:
| In the last half of the last millenium, we achieved
| widespread literacy, invented the printing press, made
| publishing available to the public, and invented the
| internet. I don't think we can assume the process that
| worked before this tech will definitely work now.
| chongli wrote:
| That ship has sailed. This usage dates back to the time of
| Dickens, Bronte, Joyce, etc [1]:
|
| _As Dan Smith has pointed out in his reply to my comment on
| Mike Ruiz 's answer, this usage crossed over into general
| acceptability quite a while ago, having been employed in
| works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, William Makepeace
| Thackeray, James Joyce and Thomas Hardy, and so on. What
| might be happening is sort of a "resistance" against this
| meaning of literally, which people are starting to believe
| should mean something closer to what it originally did._
|
| [1] https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-term-literally-come-to-
| mea...
| voidmain wrote:
| Sean Hou's answer in that Quora thread is the correct one.
| The word "literally" never means "figuratively" or
| "hyperbolically", but it can (like any other word) be
| _used_ figuratively or hyperbolically. By analogy, someone
| can dishonestly say "Honestly, I didn't do it," when they
| did. This doesn't change the meaning of the word
| "honestly". There are no words in English that cannot be
| used in a lie, and neither are there any words that cannot
| be used in hyperbole or metaphor. You can, if you like,
| dislike hyperbole (I dislike dishonesty!) but there is no
| use worrying about the meaning of the word.
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| > The word "literally" never means "figuratively" or
| "hyperbolically"
|
| Yes it does. The dictionaries have added the second
| figurative meaning:
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
| 1auralynn wrote:
| Interestingly, there is actually a long history of
| literally switching back and forth between its original
| meaning and "figuratively" over the ages. My fiance did his
| thesis on it!
| ninkendo wrote:
| I noticed this with one of my favorite channels, Vsauce... they
| were one of the pilot channels to be "upgraded" to YouTube Red,
| back when that was a thing; the series was called "Mind Field".
| I never subscribed to it when it was premium, but when YouTube
| Red shut down it all became free.
|
| I tried watching a few episodes of the ostensibly "higher
| quality" format of Mind Field, and it was demonstrably worse in
| most aspects. Bloated, way more filler, way more pointless
| behind the scenes stuff of the host interacting with the
| guests, and an overall _much_ slower pace of interesting
| material. It felt a lot more like a cookie cutter Nat Geo show
| instead of the denser, faster paced material of Vsauce.
|
| Overall I think that the smaller, self-produced (or minimally
| produced with small teams) format is the future and I'm glad to
| see that YouTube is failing to change that despite their
| efforts.
| sampo wrote:
| I think I have watched more Alex (French guy cooking) and
| Guga (Sous vide everything), than I have watched real
| commercial studio-produced cooking shows.
| dharmab wrote:
| Babish is a go-to when I need to learn to make something
| new.
| JCharante wrote:
| To be fair Vsauce ruined itself a long time ago. Obviously
| the next step for a popular channel is to turn it into a
| company that churns out content for money, but it kills the
| charm and quality.
|
| Should just stick to (relative to big orgs) low budget and
| take in those views.
|
| Phillip DeFranco's stuff was good until he started a million
| offshoots and it wasn't personal anymore. Then it was just
| mediocre unorganic (as in how pop bands are formed by talent
| scouts) stuff.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| All channels will eventually burn out and fade, but the
| youtube model guarantees that there will always be new
| shiny content.
| wincy wrote:
| I mean Pewdiepie still mostly just makes dumb videos of
| him and gets an absurd number of views, and has over 100m
| subscribers.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Which is another way of staying that YouTube will leave a
| wake of burned out and faded creators behind it.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Just like all social media
| Razengan wrote:
| Just like all human art and celebrity culture.
| ta2234234242 wrote:
| We loved the Bee Gees, then we hated them, then we loved
| them again...
|
| My favorite band from that time is ABBA, if only because
| they totally rocked these cat dresses, which would have
| made a killing on etsy if the internet existed back then.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/27/abba-
| announce-...
| bradlys wrote:
| This is also probably just survivor bias at work too. I
| will say that vsauce still made some good content even
| after mindfield. I just had to avoid the mindfield stuff.
| jjcon wrote:
| I thunk vsauce has still put out some great content after
| mindfield but it has been pretty sparse. I think Michael
| could totally reclaim it but it would take time.
| scrollaway wrote:
| I thought Mind Field was really cool. Obviously a very
| different feel to the normal vsauce videos but ... I dunno, I
| don't see what's wrong about going that route.
|
| Derek of Veritasium is trying to go that route by himself. He
| released some documentaries of his own (which actually _were_
| of lower quality than his regular material, I thought).
|
| Wendover is also releasing some long-form documentaries. He's
| much better at it, actually.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| "one day ... we'll become like iTunes and TV"
| sleavey wrote:
| > "I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it
| more expensive for Yahoo."
|
| Love this.
|
| Another thing: Jeff Huber thought that having 2.5 Google
| engineers would be enough to outcompete YouTube at the time.
| Given that they eventually acquired YouTube for over $1B, was
| that essentially paying for their ~2 best engineers?
| raldi wrote:
| YouTube grew explosively between the time of these messages
| (Nov 2005) and their Nov 2006 acquisition.
|
| I made my Reddit account in Nov 2005, and remember for the
| first half of that period, YT was just one of several competing
| video sites, particularly in the shadow of one called
| throwawayyourtv.com (see
| https://www.reddit.com/domain/throwawayyourtv.com/ )
|
| Then suddenly by the end of the summer, YT was pulling away
| from the pack, seemingly unstoppable.
| belltaco wrote:
| I was also on Reddit at the time and noticed something funny
| on YouTube, it'd recommend other videos featured on Reddit
| because their algo saw unrelated videos being watched by the
| same group so thought it should recommend the others,
| although they were irrelevant.
| andruby wrote:
| Any idea why youtube was "winning" over the other sites? What
| did they do differently or better?
|
| Or was it just "luck" and better content being uploaded?
| dilap wrote:
| I personally remember around that time that watching a
| video was pretty hit-or-miss, but YouTube always seemed to
| work. I've also heard that they focused on supporting the
| max possible number of codecs for upload, so uploaders were
| less likely to hit problems as well. I think both of those
| could have played a large part in their success.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| YouTube was the only place where I could find pirated
| uploads of "Lazy Sunday", so there was that.
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| I believe lazy Sunday was actually the inflection point
| for YouTube.. the YouTube version got shared way more
| than other sites... and (because?) it stayed up the whole
| time.
| raldi wrote:
| YT beat sites founded later because they were too late to
| catch up with the network effects.
|
| YT beat sites founded earlier (and there were many) because
| browser, codec, and bandwidth technology just wasn't ready
| yet to support decent web video.
|
| YT beat contemporaneous sites, perhaps, because they were
| (as far as I know) the only one around in early 2006 with
| serious funding. ThrowAwayYourTV.com, for instance, was
| just one dude in his 20's who had another day job.
| mmmmmmmike wrote:
| One thing I distinctly remember they _weren't_ doing better
| was letting you just watch your video in piece. The
| controls were obtrusive and always visible, the background
| was bright white, and the suggested videos took up a huge
| chunk of the screen. I don't know how much that may have
| played to their advantage (by encouraging you to surf new
| videos) but I remember avoiding YouTube links in favor of
| basically anything else for a good long while.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| I'd consider all of those "bugs" to be features, myself.
| As they say in French, everyone has gout. The autohiding
| controls and loss of the always-visible time bar really
| ticked me off when they happened, and backgrounds other
| than white annoy the hell out of me.
| arihant wrote:
| I my mind, YouTube did not prematurely optimize.
|
| 1. They took full advantage of DMCA and pirated videos made
| easy home there until copyright notice came in. No
| technology to try and do it before upload, no pre publish
| human intervention.
|
| 2. YouTube player was just better, especially with most of
| the globe on dial up. It would let videos buffer for hours
| until 100%, even if you had a disconnection it would just
| restart downloading as it should. Won't just stop after
| some time to preserve bandwidth. Once downloaded, videos
| won't restream and you could easily move on timeline so
| long as you kept the browser window open. None of their
| competitors did this as I recall and were preserving
| bandwidth they would never get to use.
| blihp wrote:
| It was trivial for authors to upload a variety of popular
| video formats/codecs and it 'just worked' in pretty much
| all web browsers for users.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| It was mostly better content, but also it just worked. Many
| of the other sites didn't work well. Video sites are
| actually very complex engineering-wise and have lots of
| moving parts.
|
| Additionally, some turned on ads right away, which people
| hated. There was also YouTube embeds. The site just felt
| fun.
|
| By contrast, Google Video had very little good content.
| There wasn't anything fun about it. Whereas YouTube had a
| social aspect to it, Google Video felt like a VCR.
| flomo wrote:
| Youtube's flash player was massively superior to plugin-
| based quicktime/windows media/mystery google thing.
| (Several replies and nobody has mentioned it, it was a huge
| factor.)
|
| Also you could just name a song and Youtube had the music
| video - it was the "napster" of video.
| Andrex wrote:
| From my perspective, it was their embeddable video player.
| You'd see it pop up in other sites, spreading the YouTube
| name on external sites the web-over. I remember thinking
| that capability was extremely cool at the time (and built
| off things like iframe chatboxes and embeddable hit
| counters.)
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| Well if the name "Throw Away Your TV".com is anything to go
| by... maybe syllable count.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > why youtube was "winning" over the other sites?
|
| MySpace.
|
| People would upload music videos and embed them on their
| profile, back when the "Embed HTML" feature was still
| novel. The player made it easy for users to copy/paste to
| their own profile, and then network effects kicked and the
| rest is history.
|
| I was at the parent company at the time and through the
| News Corp acquisition, and remember the shit show when
| MySpace first banned YT embeds in late 2005 and again in
| 2006 ("for security"). Lot of internal bitterness that YT
| was riding their coattails.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Yup.
|
| The embedding market was huge.
|
| It's funny how people forget history so quickly. Even
| Facebook's story is simply forgotten. Fb does what google
| can't ... copy features and products, and cannibalize
| their own audience when a product is obsolete/outdated.
|
| Google usually tries to copy, but launches as a separate
| product.
|
| Or they buy and mess it up.
|
| Facebook is good at both integrating acquisitions, and at
| copying features and leveraging their userbase.
| Aissen wrote:
| Jeff does react about this downthread, and the feedback from
| Chris Sacca is also quite interesting:
|
| https://twitter.com/jhuber/status/1433863045613174784
| hitekker wrote:
| Jeff Huber did not think that. Peter Chane, the product manager
| of Google Videos, wrote the 1.5 engineers comment and "we have
| all of their [Youtube's] features in our q4 plan".
|
| The email thread indicates that Peter wanted Google Video to
| win and wasn't listening to Jeff. Jeff then raised the Youtube
| acquisition with his peers, and then to their CEO.
|
| A year later, Peter proposed a deal to link "Flip Video"
| cameras to Google Videos in the hopes of competing with
| Youtube's exponential video production. That gambit was
| squelched by his boss.
|
| https://9to5google.com/2020/07/31/google-flip-video-youtube-...
| capableweb wrote:
| > and were thinking about a acq with Yahoo
|
| > and it would be nice for y! not to have them
|
| > their content quality is worse than ours ... if we pick them up
| it would be defensive vs yahoo
|
| > I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it more
| expensive for Yahoo
|
| Holy anti-competitive moly, how can these people talk like this
| while (supposedly) knowing the laws in the country they operate
| in? In clear text emails on top of that... Google supposedly has
| the smartest people working there, but doesn't seem like it's
| true for management.
|
| I hope they get to pay for this, at least to prove that no
| companies are too big to get sanctioned for anti-competitive
| behavior. If they are not, I think we can all conclude that the
| government has lost all of its spine.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Are defensive buys really illegal in the US in the first place?
| joebob42 wrote:
| Yeah but this is in 08 right? I was under the impression you
| can do whatever you want if you aren't already a monopoly in
| the market
|
| Edit: 05
| emerongi wrote:
| Aren't they doing the opposite: making the bid on Youtube
| competitive? They would have to outbid Yahoo, giving the
| Youtube team a competitive price. Buying a valuable asset does
| not seem anti-competitive to me at all.
|
| Anti-competitive in my mind is when there is an agreement to
| not compete, like the Apple-Google case where they agreed to
| not compete on salaries.
| [deleted]
| dageshi wrote:
| None of that is anti-competitive? It's just business?
| afarrell wrote:
| Do people generally know the laws of the United States? There
| are a lot of laws.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| OP's remarks are more accurately paraphrased as "how can the
| executive of a major tech company leave a paper trail of
| illegal-sounding things, surely someone so high up is aware
| of how antitrust laws work."
|
| OP doesn't say anything about the general public being aware
| of the entirety of the legal code.
| capableweb wrote:
| If you are in the management team working for one of the
| largest companies in the world, who happen to be based in the
| US, I sure do hope you know about things like insider
| trading, anti-competitive behavior and other ills described
| by US law, otherwise you can put your company in trouble at
| any time.
|
| Especially if you're in the discussions around acquiring
| companies. You want it to be very obvious you're not
| acquiring something in order to fuck it up for a competitor,
| you want to acquire a company in order to further yourself.
| [deleted]
| blihp wrote:
| In Microsoft's day they were looking to 'knife the baby' and
| 'cut off air supply'. That was about a decade earlier and
| nothing too terrible happened to them.
| draw_down wrote:
| > they aren't doing anything where I say "wow they have some big
| video brains"
|
| Sometimes I wonder what people in these big-brain companies are
| thinking. Ay yi yi.
|
| It's hard to remember now, but YouTube made watching web videos
| not be an exercise in pain. I know I'm speaking with hindsight
| here but kind of an obvious value prop.
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| Google Video was decent. But it lacked the social element.
| [deleted]
| silisili wrote:
| Yeah, I'm unsure of most of the writers so want to be careful
| not to offend anyone, but the guy who wrote that, and also that
| G would be ahead of them soon and just needed Java people, AND
| that he didn't think much of their system and talent...did not
| seem in tune with reality.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's hard to remember that period well and put things into
| context, but if you were there, honestly, Google Video was
| pretty good. In the very early days Google Video vs YouTube
| _could_ have been a toss-up. There was nothing particularly
| compelling about the UX on YouTube (it got much better
| later). Google Video wasn 't amazing UX, but technically it
| was fine. And had the advantage of getting prime real estate
| in search results.
|
| YouTube's early success I suspect had a lot more to do with
| them paying fast and loose with enforcing IP rules. It wasn't
| until a bit after the Google acquisition that they started
| getting more serious about it.
|
| EDIT: also remember this is an era when Google was actually
| doing quite well shipping rather geeky and minimalistic
| invented-by-engineer consumer-facing things. There was no
| reason to _assume_ they wouldn 't do well with Google Video.
| They had just recently had a lot of success with Gmail. Gchat
| was a thing. Their calendar was good. They were making some
| ok stuff.
| silisili wrote:
| Yeah, it has been a while for sure. You make good points,
| and Sacca kind of touched on a similar note in his reply.
| Google had thus far been technically correct, and built
| good tools(email, search). But video is such a different
| realm...as he said... people just wanted to have fun. And
| for that technical correctness meant little... it's not a
| problem you can throw brains at. Even today, look at how
| TikTok has absolutely crushed others. Even with the power
| of big G, YT feels stagnant and dated in comparison.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Kind of like how Dropbox is sort of trivial, but they largely
| won by being really easy and really good/reliable. Or even
| Zoom; everybody can do video chat, but Zoom killed it in terms
| of UX (...at the cost of security, but even so they _did_ win
| at UX).
| cblconfederate wrote:
| or because they could afford to give away free gigabytes of
| storage at a time when it was scarce. Zoom OTOH was real good
| before it became hip
| os7borne wrote:
| "I think if we had one more good java/ui engineer we'd be kicking
| butt vs youtube."
|
| Unfortunately, this very attitude continues to be the bane of
| every large company. Thinking they can throw a body on the
| problem can make them invincible.
| ausudhz wrote:
| 1.5 engineers?
| pcurve wrote:
| Good old days of development.
| iamshs wrote:
| Full time equivalent most probably.
| w0mbat wrote:
| I was the one front-end Java UI engineer and Nikhil (mentioned
| in the email) was the half. He was a PM who helped out on
| coding half-time.
|
| The Google Video team was very small.
| jtsiskin wrote:
| What does you think of Peter Chane?
| w0mbat wrote:
| Nice guy, knows his stuff.
| chubot wrote:
| The part that's more interesting to me is the "UI/Java" part.
| It's very hard to think of any consumer web company from that
| era that iterated on a UI quickly with Java and hit exponential
| growth.
|
| Here is a list of YC startups, and you have to scroll down
| before you hit anything but Ruby/Python (and C++ for back ends,
| presumably Go too). But I'd say this is true of all web
| companies in general, not just YC companies. (You'd probably
| see more PHP in non-YC companies, and I'd argue it's still more
| appropriate than Java for this use case)
|
| https://charliereese.ca/article/top-50-y-combinator-tech-sta...
|
| Aside from the outliers that were GMail and Maps (acquisition),
| Google had a lot of trouble producing good UIs. Google+ was a
| good example of UI well below the state of the art at the time.
|
| Notably YouTube was a huge Python codebase ... which Google was
| already using at the time, but not much for web front ends.
| zorr wrote:
| This email seems to be about 6 months before they released
| GWT 1.0. Their toolkit to compile Java to JS for web UI's.
| They likely already used it internally by then.
|
| If I remember correctly at the time they also used lots of
| Java on the backend.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Interestingly the first version of Google Search's frontend
| was written in Python, based off the Medusa framework. It was
| replaced by a heavily-optimized C webserver (GWS) written by
| Craig Silverstein in 1999. The Python -> C rewrite took the
| frontend server fleet from 30 machines down to 3, and it
| would've fit on 1 but they needed fault tolerance.
|
| There continued (and continues) to be a large prejudice
| against Python for large-scale software projects at Google,
| even among people who were core members of the Python
| Software Foundation! I think this is a good example of
| peoples' mental models of the world ossifying and not
| understanding how economics have changed. Python _continues_
| to be 30x or more slower than C - _but it doesn 't matter_.
| Computing has gotten so cheap that you just eat the cost,
| build your product anyways, and then figure out how to
| optimize after you sell to Google.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I suspect what you're seeing is a bit of "I've got a hammer
| and everything looks like a nail" in relation to the fancy
| shiny GWT thing that some teams at Google built at the time.
| IMHO GWT was an awful toolkit and had a slow and terrible
| development cycle, but there was a lot of hype about it back
| then as if it was solving the bridge between dynamic front
| ends and backends written in Java.
|
| I wasn't even at Google at the time but had management types
| trying to foist it on me at a company I worked at, and it was
| frankly a failure. I'm not _sure_ if Google Video was done in
| GWT, but it certainly had the _look_ of a GWT product.
|
| When I came to Google in 2012 there were still some products
| using it but it was mostly recognized for being clunky and
| those products have been migrated.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Pretty sure it was GWT. I joined in 2009 when they were in
| the midst of the rewrite.
| sulam wrote:
| Google internally has a kind of cultural belief that the
| company's engineers are far more capable than most engineers in
| the rest of the world. It's fairly arrogant, but some of it is
| founded on some real advantages around tooling and systems
| engineering.
| magicalist wrote:
| Youtube was like 10 people at the time, so it's not
| ridiculous given they had the rest of Google's infrastructure
| to fall back on. Still wasn't sufficient, though :)
| sangnoir wrote:
| IIRC, in that time-frame, Google had (one of) the highest
| revenue per engineer _in the world_ - arrogant or not, they
| had good reasons for their self-belief.
| nudpiedo wrote:
| A Person is working only 50% in That Project/Area due other
| responsibilities (project management, partial time, shared time
| with another team or whatever)
| ausudhz wrote:
| Yes but doesn't work that way, with context switching cost
| and all of the rest people who are 50% in one projects are
| not really that effective.
|
| If anything, shows that they were not that committed to even
| put a resource dedicated to that project
| tialaramex wrote:
| It depends how granular the 50% is. I don't feel much cost
| from "context switching" overnight if Tuesday and Wednesday
| are project A time while Monday and Friday are project B
| time, but it gets to be a problem if I'm context switching
| hour by hour or taking random calls about A versus B during
| my normal working day.
| ausudhz wrote:
| Don't know where you work, but you're not switching from
| cooking to washing dishes.
|
| So yes there's a cost involved and is never a clear cut
| especially if you run projects in parallel.
| adjkant wrote:
| As someone who regularly works on a lot of projects at
| once or regularly context switching, I think this is
| missing the larger point here. Returns are not magically
| nothing for someone 50/50 on two projects, but there is
| of course a cost, and that cost increases with the number
| of projects, the complexity of the projects, and the
| pressure for delivery of the projects. It also varies
| person to person.
|
| Going back to your original post:
|
| > Yes but doesn't work that way, with context switching
| cost and all of the rest people who are 50% in one
| projects are not really that effective.
|
| Again, person dependent but missing the point. Would have
| it been more accurate to say they have 1.4327 engineers
| on the project? Probably. Is that helpful when everyone
| understands what 1.5 actually means? Not really. And two
| projects is not so unreasonable depending on the
| situation.
|
| > If anything, shows that they were not that committed to
| even put a resource dedicated to that project
|
| 100% yes to that. And as we have learned since this
| comment thread, it was not a 50% time situation but
| actually someone wearing two hats (PM and engineer):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28426523
| pcurve wrote:
| I could be wrong but I took it as commentary on seemingly
| small number of headcount. (Vs fractional nature)
| privatdozent wrote:
| Should never have been allowed
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