As much as I hate to admit it, not long ago I didn’t even know what You Tube was. A friend of mine in the media business pointed me in their direction last Spring, telling me that this was a company that had the potential to shake the media world off it’s hinges. You Tube’s platform for personal expression is immediate and engaging. Based on the numbers and my own personal experience, the You Tube vortex appears to be very strong. In a year’s time, You Tube went from nothing to becoming the Internet’s reincarnation of Vaudeville, where both audience and players funnel into an electronic mosh pit of video surfing. If you go to look at one 30 second video can you keep from looking at another, and another and another and …….?
But more than just a place to exchange videos, You Tube lets everybody be a critic by giving voice to their opinions. Most of us at one time or another have probably thought we could do a better job than the seemingly humorless or incompetent movie critics in the world. Like most pundits (including technology analysts), there are a small percentage of movie critics who seem to know what they are talking about while the rest just seem to like the sound of their own voices. You Tube gives each of us the power to appreciate things on our own and provides us with a vehicle to critique. In the end, this is probably just as important as the ability to produce and publish videos. The kinds of things people communicate in You Tube are little intangible personal elements of their lives.
And that is what Google sees in the deal. They might be the most heavily used computer-utility in the world, but they haven’t had a way to compete with e-Bay for Internet-user mind share (Google users tend to pass through, whereas e-Bay users tend to spend a lot of time and shop). The thing that makes e-Bay work so well is its feedback system that establishes trust between total strangers. Google wanted to find a similar way for their users to engage each other and they believe they have found the intangible recipe with You Tube. There is no doubt that You Tube can get under your skin. The question is, would you buy a used car from somebody on Google partly because they like the same kind of videos that you do?
The message from Google here is clear: the most important thing in the world for a technology company is to build an excited community. If a company can do that, it can have irresistible market pull. This business philosophy applies broadly beyond Google, e-Bay and the websphere. Providing superior products and technical support are key elements to building an excited community of customers that trusts a vendor and its products and services. People tend to look to analysts for opinions on vendors and products. The analysts are pretty good at understanding the strengths and weaknesses of various vendors, but they seldom know much about products, how they work and how they are managed. If you want to know how a product works or how a vendor’s technical support is, ask a customer with experience. The best companies have the most excited and enthusiastic customers.
