Soapbox, Or, Why Microsoft Didn't Pay So Much For YouTube
Microsoft sent out invitations to its video community website beta Soapbox on Monday and last night we got around to checking it out. The interface is awesome, the video quality is awesome and the price they paid in development is probably somewhere under what Google paid for YouTube. The content and the user base... Well, there is no content or user base. Did Microsoft ever seriously consider buying YouTube's content and user base? Check out Ballmer's Business Week interview on the subject. He thinks it's a fad and there's no business model. "Is YouTube really some permanent, long-term thing, or is it a fashion?" and "Right now, there's no business model for YouTube that would justify $1.6 billion."
According to the P-I's Microsoft blog they considered it to the tune of $500 million, but since Google paid three times that amount for the video sharing service this week that's questionably a "serious" offer.
Asked about those reports today, Microsoft didn't precisely confirm them, but didn't directly deny them, either. In a statement, the company said it "evaluated acquiring this type of technology several months ago" but decided that building its own video-sharing service would be "a more cost-effective way to compete in this new space."
Soapbox represents Microsoft's "more cost-effective way to compete in this new space," which means to Seattlest that Microsoft has chosen not to compete in this space. Soapbox is better than YouTube in every conceivable way when it comes to technology, but culturally it won't ever be YouTube and the culture of YouTube is what makes it worthwhile to users and attractive to buyers and advertisers. It remains to be seen what kind of effect the Google deal will have on the culture of YouTube, but it's reasonable to expect that it will take a hit under its new corporate overlords and their crazy copyright laws. Maybe it's the Web 2.0 Heisenberg uncertainty principle: The act of buying a culture alters that culture, and not for the better. That said, Flickr doesn't seem to be slowing down since Yahoo bought it.
Now off the soapbox and back to, uh, Soapbox and the geek mono-culture currently represented on it. Bill Gates comedy, Vista's boot screen, and, well, Bill Gates again; those are three of the four most watched videos on the service.
And just to show you the fancy new tech here's a Soapbox embed of some show at the High Dive:
