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by nl 1406 days ago
But that was a failure of marketing and strategy (specifically YT decided to take on copyright claims, Google Video didn't try), not execution.

It was Google engineering that allowed YT to scale.
1 comments
random314 1406 days ago
Not really. Google video would take 24 hours to make an uploaded video available, whereas YouTube made it available right away.

Google video engineering wasn't up to snuff and management decided to move fast and just acquire YouTube.

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ChuckNorris89 1406 days ago
>Google video engineering wasn't up to snuff

So hiring the best 1337-coders in the world didn't automatically give them the best product? Shocking.

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random314 1405 days ago
If you look at the details, I would lay the blame on Ghemawat and Jeff Dean and their insistence on using C++ for everything. Nobody could argue against them, even VPs.

When YouTube joined Google, their engineers were shocked to find that Google engineers were writing 1000s of lines of server side C++ code, that could be accomplished in 100s of lines of python code. Which explained why YouTube was able to move a lot faster and pump out features, while Google video was struggling to keep up.

It was not the leetcode engineers, but Dean and Ghemawat insisting on C++ only on the server. Its still true today. Go might be making inroads now.

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