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The number of customers is, effectively, infinite though. YouTube continues to be engineered and continues to grow. It could have, realistically, been finished

The number of customers is, effectively, infinite though. YouTube continues to be engineered and continues to grow. It could have, realistically, been finished over a decade ago. But they repeated branch out into new markets with new features, and that seems to work from them.

Nextgrid 8mo ago
The new features are an order of magnitude less complexity to build than the main feature - hosting video at scale, which is complete and just requires maintenance.
- paganel 8mo ago
  > hosting video at scale, I'm going on a limb here and saying that the scale that YouTube was running on back in 2010-2015 is not the same scale as now, and if they had left their whole infrastructure unchanged, a "finished product", so to speak, the site would have been feeling dated and would have eventually been killed off.
  - Nextgrid 8mo ago
    Without having access to the source code we can only speculate but I believe even in those days YouTube already outgrew vertical scaling and thus had to be built as a horizontally-scalable system. That is the hard part. Adding extra nodes to an existing horizontally-scalable system (that has already been operating and has its bugs ironed out) is much easier.
    - slhck 8mo ago
      That is really a bit of an oversimplification IMO. Please check, for example, the Netflix tech blog and read about what has changed in the past 10 years or so when it comes to architecting video processing and video delivery systems. There's a tremendous amount of engineering work there which advances the entire industry. For instance, it's not trivial to add live events to a VoD infrastructure at that scale — it's not like you just add a few more nodes and buy faster encoders.
    - AbstractH24 8mo ago
      Its a different skill set. And if its not one that you have or are interested in then it makes for a great time to exit.
ymolodtsov 8mo ago
But YouTube is still a growing and maybe a profitable business (they disclose its revenue but not costs). Bending Spoons buys stalled or failed products and keeps them alive with a central engineering team in Italy which is far cheaper than anything in the US. That's their business model. If the company you work for is acquired by them you should start looking for a new place.

Nextgrid 8mo ago

The new features are an order of magnitude less complexity to build than the main feature - hosting video at scale, which is complete and just requires maintenance.

paganel 8mo ago
> hosting video at scale, I'm going on a limb here and saying that the scale that YouTube was running on back in 2010-2015 is not the same scale as now, and if they had left their whole infrastructure unchanged, a "finished product", so to speak, the site would have been feeling dated and would have eventually been killed off.
- Nextgrid 8mo ago
  Without having access to the source code we can only speculate but I believe even in those days YouTube already outgrew vertical scaling and thus had to be built as a horizontally-scalable system. That is the hard part. Adding extra nodes to an existing horizontally-scalable system (that has already been operating and has its bugs ironed out) is much easier.
  - slhck 8mo ago
    That is really a bit of an oversimplification IMO. Please check, for example, the Netflix tech blog and read about what has changed in the past 10 years or so when it comes to architecting video processing and video delivery systems. There's a tremendous amount of engineering work there which advances the entire industry. For instance, it's not trivial to add live events to a VoD infrastructure at that scale — it's not like you just add a few more nodes and buy faster encoders.
  - AbstractH24 8mo ago
    Its a different skill set. And if its not one that you have or are interested in then it makes for a great time to exit.

ymolodtsov 8mo ago

But YouTube is still a growing and maybe a profitable business (they disclose its revenue but not costs). Bending Spoons buys stalled or failed products and keeps them alive with a central engineering team in Italy which is far cheaper than anything in the US. That's their business model. If the company you work for is acquired by them you should start looking for a new place.