FULL STEAM AHEAD
Well, for a mere $1.65 billion worth of it's stock currently valued at over $130 billion, Google now has a feature (YouTube), that it can convert into a product (see earlier post for context).
Lots of buzz on Techmeme on this tonight of course to go through.
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times pieces of course provide good general context.
And of course Mark Cuban's assessment of the deal he'd been arguing against for some days now is a must read. In particular because he sold Broadcast.com his version of YouTube in 1999 to the Google of the day, Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in stock.
But Broadcast.com didn't have the legal copyright issues of YouTube and that's a BIG difference.
The WSJ has a priceless bit on the reaction from News Corp., owners of the other web 2.0 darling MySpace, both before and after the deal was announced, and what Google is doing in response:
News Corp. sniffed around YouTube as recently as last week, but never made a firm offer because the start-up said it was not for sale, say people familiar with the matter. On Friday, when the news of the Google negotiations surfaced, News Corp. sent a letter to YouTube asking for an opportunity to participate in the sale process, according to the familiar people.
YouTube didn't respond, these people said. Behind the scenes, Google's deal to purchase YouTube is threatening to create a rift between Google and News Corp., which jointly made headlines in August with an ad-brokering deal under which Google guaranteed revenue of $900 million over three and a half years to News Corp. for its MySpace social-networking service and other sites.
Over the weekend, News Corp. executives expressed their displeasure with the deal to Google and threatened to remove any links to YouTube videos placed by users on their MySpace blog pages, according to a person close to the situation.
Google's Mr. Schmidt and Advertising Sales Vice President Tim Armstrong are scheduled to meet this week in Los Angeles with News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, President Peter Chernin and Ross Levinsohn, head of its Fox Interactive Media online unit, to discuss the matter.
Now, that's real drama.
Congratulations and good luck to all the participants. Godspeed through the treacherous legal waters ahead.
Google is taking all the internet.Every part of www, will be a part from Google.com
Google is becoming to big.
Posted by: Designer Sunglasses | Monday, October 23, 2006 at 04:48 PM