A lot of people seem to be wondering about the wisdom of Google buying YouTube with it’s legal problems and how it potentially competes with Google Video but I think those two issues are relatively irrelevant from Google’s perpective. The acquisition of YouTube doesn’t surprise me too much, mainly because YouTube is the prime place on the web where people are uploading video content. It doesn’t really matter that a lot of that material is copyrighted because bringing YouTube into Google’s holdings as a premier content collector fits in very nicely with Google’s mission:
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Everything Google does, especially the stuff that makes people scratch their heads, ultimately falls back to that statement. This is something people need to realize and something I’ve noticed for a while now. Think about it: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information…” They want it all.
What’s the best way to get it all? Make yourself the gatekeeper. Supply the best (or buy the best) tools to create content or collect content and people will gladly support you in your mission. Google Pages, Base, Spreadsheets, Notebook, Calendar, even GMail are all about letting you create content on Google’s servers. And they buy tools like Writely (now “Google Docs“) and SketchUp because, again, it’s a way for you to create content directly on their servers. If they can get you to create content on their servers then it makes it infinitely easy for them to slice, dice and organize that information however they want. And if they can’t get you to create content for them, then the next best thing is to be the biggest archive holder (enter YouTube).
What most people think Google is about, namely search, is just a means to the end of their mission. Possibly even a secondary means, if you step back and look at the big picture.
Why is it so important to organize all the world’s information? We all know that information is power. If you can put yourself in the position of being a gatekeeper of all information, being a portal, being an oracle, then you’ve got an extreme of influence over the world. People potentially become dependant on you for their lives to work smoothly and you become indispensable. What company wouldn’t want to be in that position?
I like Google, mainly because I drink the kool-aid about how cool and useful the tools they provide me with are. I use them every day and yes, I am very dependant on them. But every now and then I hear the little voice in the back of my head whispering that I hope they uphold their motto “Don’t be evil.” as fervently as they seem to be pursuing their mission. The rest of the time I just sit back and admire the genius of it all.
