skibum - 3:19 am on Apr 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

Wow, thowing away 3.1 billion just to shut MS out on a temporary basis. Google is completely insane.

It's not insane at all. From a purely financial POV, it's pricey, but......It takes a long time to build up a network like that and by taking the largest players off the table everyone else must build from scratch or start with much smaller building blocks. Even if MSFT could build something the size of DCLK, it might take them 5 years and by that time Google is so far ahead what MSFT does doesn't matter anyway.

YouTube on the other hand was probably a bit more insane but that might even pay out over the long haul.

Other net companies, traditional media companies, cable companies, newspapers should take a step back and think about how this is all evolving. Let Google sell your TV spots, your radio, the ads on your website and they make money off each and every transaction. Your customers turn to Google to buy your inventory and GOOG controls your market and the revenue you can generate.

There may be some strange bed fellows popping up if anyone gets serious about trying to maintain control of the media they sell and have more knowledge of their own business than Google does. Do DCLK clients start to defect to..........what is there to defect to, Atlas I guess, maybe MSFT could buy Aquantive. Does MSFT have any idea what they are doing, any plan to compete here, any realization this is not a shrink wrap software market?