Faith + Reason = Truth

Youtube was started by 3 guys and sold a year later for 1 and a half billion dollars (give or take, depending on what Google's stock does) to Google.  Is that a smart move by Google, or sheer insanity?  There's no clear answer.  Youtube didn't invent web video, they just simplified the process of posting it to the internet in an easily watchable and sharable format.  Why didn't Google develop that process, you ask?  They tried.  And I would bet they had "smarter" people, more of them, and lots of money for equipment and technology at their disposal than those 3 guys did.  Granted, those 3 guys had some investment capital at their disposal at some point, but nothing on the order of the resources that Google brings to bear.  What's at work here is the unknown, little understood, much-studied process of how technology goes from zero to a billion (dollars, people, whatever) overnight.  As Microsoft is well aware, no matter how many brilliant people and virtually unlimited resources an entity passionately commits to a problem, the odds are against them finding the solution that will be embraced by the masses.  To Google's credit, rather than following MSFT's playbook and continuing to develop their own product and waging a deathmatch war of attrition against the product that the marketplace has already christened the victor, they simply took their medicine and brought the Youtube folks (and user base) in-house.  Google clearly remembers Yahoo not making a big enough offer for Google early on in their search engine war, and look where both companies stand today.  Google, if nothing else, appears to learn from history and is intent on not repeating the mistakes others in this arena have made.  I see the huge purchase offer for Youtube as the right move in this case, but time and media tie-ups will tell the tale over the long haul (Google/Youtube has already lost Viacom to Joost, and things look to be coming apart with CBS, but it's still early, and it remains to be seen whether the Youtube community will switch to Joost for content or stay loyal and continue to enjoy the network effects in place at Youtube).