The point is that they had to buy youtube, not that they weren't able to put a shiny interface on top after they bought it. What I'm trying to get at is, imagi

The point is that they had to buy youtube, not that they weren't able to put a shiny interface on top after they bought it. What I'm trying to get at is, imagine if Microsoft bought youtube before google could - given Google's track record with their own video search, they would not have been able to compete with youtube, and they would almost certainly have simply lost that market. I think that's what happened here. Google is amazing at algorithms, but has very little business sense...they can buy a successful product, but rarely create one of their own.