[shliachtx]

Except they purchased their way into many of these.

Their advertising business was built on a number of acquisitions (DoubleClick, AdMob) - strategic acquisitions, surely, and they improved on them since - but it is not as if they bult the business from the ground up. The same goes for video streaming (YouTube - after attempting to create their own), and mobile OS (Android).

With Android in particular it can be argued that it would not be what it is today without them, but they also heavily leveraged their other services to promote and maintain control over Android.

[rstuart4133]

> Except they purchased their way into many of these.

They did. But youtube.com wasn't that big when they bought it. In fact by definition most of the things they bought (like maps.google.com) weren't big. The obvious corollary is Google is very good buy scaling something up while keeping it rock solid.

And, they are. Examples of original things that did come out of Google are Kubernetes, the Site Reliability Engineering Handbook, and pulling off something I thought was impossible: Spanner, a global distributed ACID database. From what I can tell they have constructed the fastest, most reliable distributed computing platform on the planet.

They are the Toyota's of the computing landscape: nothing particularly outstanding in any particular model of car, the secret sauce is the infrastructure and processes they've developed to manufacture those cars that ensures they are both cheap and reliable. And so it is with Google. They aren't particularly good at coming up with new products. In fact they often buy them. But then those products get moved onto best computing infrastructure on the planet. If the products are any good, they seemingly grow without effort to become a dominant player.

[sharkjacobs]

> youtube.com wasn't that big when they bought it

YouTube then wasn't then anything like it is now, but it was by far the largest video website of its type. I felt like they bought it because Google Video failed to compete with it.

[tsycho]

I see this oft repeated comment about Google acquiring YouTube, DoubleClick and Android. Yes they did. But the companies they acquired were tiny upstarts, which might have even died on their own. Google built them into what they are today, and deserve 90% of the credit for their current significance.

The same applies to FB and Instagram as well, fwiw. Though imo, not as much for WhatsApp, which already had 400MM users and would have organically reached 1B+ users on its own.

[john-radio]

YouTube was delivering an average of 100 million video views per day in July 2006, months before the Google acquisition for $1,650,000,000 that same year. It's inaccurate to characterize them as a "tiny startup."

[sam0x17]

Likewise doubleclick was HUGE in the ad space I remember seeing all the doubleclick.com urls in slow page loads

[FlyMoreRockets]

How many views per day does YouTube now deliver per day?

[athms]

>It's inaccurate to characterize them as a "tiny startup."

YouTube had 65 employees when they were acquired.

I do agree that they were not a startup. This word should only be used for companies that are starting up; getting their legal structure together, hiring, and initial R&D. Once you are offering widgets (ad space), you are no longer a startup. Profitability is immaterial to startup status.

[Judgmentality]

Why does the number of employees matter? If anything that's a testament to how valuable they were, to be able to do so much with so little.

[athms]

It doesn't. My comment was about the word tiny" and 65 is tiny especially when compared to Google.

[ulfw]

And Instagram had like what... 8?

Not every company that's successful and has millions of users needs to have a bloated org

[romanoderoma]

WhatsApp had 55 employees before FB acquisition

[redisman]

I'm sorry are you joking? You do realize DoubleClick had it's IPO 10 years before Google bought them?

[akiselev]

YouTube saw the writing on the wall early - Google's capital allowed them to scale without paywalling or drowning viewers in advertisements like they are now.

The Android acquisition is a redherring - manufacturers started adopting Android en mass because it was royalty free(ish) and they had to compete against Apple's new app store mostly with feature phone OSes entirely unfit for the job.

Neither Youtube nor Google's selfless "donation" to the consumer electronics industry would have been possible without the ad business. IANAL but that looks like textbook predatory pricing (and in Android's case, can't be defended by pointing at Apple, since they don't participate in the smartphone OS market).