Tuesday, October 10, 2006

You, Tube, Can Become a Billionaire!

I know it's only money (errrrr, stock), but $1.65B for Google to grab YouTube? This is clearly a case of "money is no object" that smacks of all the dot.com madness of the late 1990's. (And the continuing run-up in executive salaries, where 7-figures means nothing.) Modest, sensible transactions get no notice - it has to be over the top.

For whatever reason, this puts me in mind of an early episode of NYPD Blue in which some old guy befriended Johnny Kelly/David Caruso and left him $50K a year when he died. The entire plotline seemed strained and incredible to me. All I could think of was that the writers had become attached to their character and didn't want him living on the chump change of cop's pay.

Everything has become so inflated, we've lost all sense of what's reasonable. If the numbers aren't stratospheric, they just dont' matter. Scott Godin's got it wrong: it's not Small is the New Big, it's Big is the New Small.

We'll see what marvelous "synergy" the GoogTube deal results in. Maybe this will be the deal that brings the world back to a more sane footing.

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