YouTube succeeded because it's a good brand and good enough software. If Google had just integrated video results more tightly into search, thus making it a fea

YouTube succeeded because it's a good brand and good enough software. If Google had just integrated video results more tightly into search, thus making it a feature rather than a distinct product, and made uploading straightforward, they might have won. They still could, actually; a lot of people I know use Google to find YouTube videos in the first place. I've noticed that whenever Google launches Google _, where _ isn't a search filter, it more often then not fails. It's the branding. I think that for a lot of people Google = web search. Google Image Search is popular because it's an easily comprehensible feature of search. Google Docs is a shit brand; if I only knew about Google search and Gmail, I'd guess it's document(ation) search. Or just a word processor. It's not immediately clear that it's a web-based office suite. A large part of Gmail's success was in creating a distinct brand; my hunch is that if it was launched as just Google Mail, it wouldn't have been nearly as successful (technical merits aside).