This morning Google announced it was spending $106 million in stock to buy On2, a maker of audio and video compression software. The very logical question I don’t hear being asked, though, is why would Google spend money for something it is already getting pretty much for free? It’s to turn yet another partner into a competitor, this time Adobe Systems.
Google already uses On2 codecs in Adobe’s Flash video, which is the very heart of its YouTube video streaming service. On2 powers YouTube’s so-called High Quality or HQ service, which due to competitive pressures on YouTube is likely to soon become YouTube’s standard codec.
It is important to remember that Flash video was not a significant competitor until it was embraced by the pre-Google YouTube. Flash video simply wasn’t that good. It relied on an antiquated H.263 codec that was originally intended for video conferencing and, while fast, was of not particularly good quality. But quality didn’t matter to the early YouTube, just fast and reliable streaming connections, which a video conferencing codec could provide.
The lower quality of streaming video had the industry broadly turning away from streaming, moving to the download delivery model championed by Apple with iTunes. Then YouTube changed everything seemingly overnight.
The important Internet video standards then were Windows Media and QuickTime with Flash video an also-ran. But how times have changed! In terms of total connections and streams, Flash video is now the Big Kahuna by a long shot. And while both QuickTime and Windows Media have moved up-market a bit with their superior H.264 and VC-1 codecs, Flash isn’t far behind with On2 and H.264, itself.
But it isn’t for YouTube alone that Flash must die. Flash is a combination of an interpreted runtime application environment AND various media containers and codecs. Well Google has its own runtime environment now in Javascript VM to take on both Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Adobe and Google have been on a collision course for some time. Adobe competes with Google Docs, for example, and now they’ll compete on video, too. And with more than half of all Internet video already going through one Google platform or another, this is an instance where Google probably has the advantage.
With Google finally under some earnings pressure and Internet advertising flat, the company has to enter new markets with new services to gain new profit centers. It happens all the time in maturing companies.
Just as YouTube gave Flash video its huge success, so Google is now trying to take it away.
Once again, Google is using Open standards and open implimentations to compete against it’s competitors. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the major factors of this announcement was not only that Google could use On2’s tech but, through controlling the IP and releasing for open usage, make it the W3 recognized standard for using video online.
By leveraging, they cut the legs out from under Adobe and push Microsoft further into a corner with their runtime and codec efforts. They manage to do this while giving the world a great building block of technology to use in creating online video.
I still think that their in browser runtime project will be bigger than Flash because it’s open and once it’s more or less stable will be pushed to be ratified into a standard with some online body. They same way they were behind HTML5 and the various bits for doing Webapps, I think they’ll push for that runtime to be a standard.
The beauty of creating all of these things into standards is that where Chrome their browser might fail, Mozilla’s Firefox (which they pretty much fund with $90M/yr for Google being the default search engine in that little search box) or Apple’s Safari will achieve. Even though Microsoft still has marketshare (for now) they have to improve their browser to compete and every step of improvement toward the W3 standards is a win for Google.
Every feature and advancement that Microsoft makes toward an Open web, the more important the web becomes (and easier and more uniform to program for) the more Google rises. Google is the current unquestioned King of the Web and as the web rises in importance, Google’s position rises with it. By improving IE, Microsoft is literally crafting the deadliest weapon against themselves.
I love how Google competes on the user experiences and uses open protocols so others can interface with them (Jabber, ReST, etc.) I only wish other companies was as nice.
I think Microsoft knows that Bing will, with the full weight of Microsoft behind it, diminish Google’s advantage and create real competition for the monopolist of the future.
I’m rooting for Google but I noticed Explorer 8 switched my search box from Google to Bing.
Looks like Google want to compete with everyone at the moment.
Flash isn’t ever going to be killed unless the competitor can handle games. Tech pundits always focus on video, because people don’t admit they play games. But ask anyone who’s published a moderately successful flash game: the traffic is simply incredible.
Have you seen O3D? It is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser. This API is shared at an early stage as part of a conversation with the broader developer community about establishing an open web standard for 3D graphics.
http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/
[…] https://www.cringely.com/2009/08/google-taketh-away/ […]
“Adobe competes with Google Docs” They do? With what?
Adobe launched their version of an online office suite available at Acrobat.com, complete with word processor (Buzzword), web conferencing/whiteboard app (ConnectNow), online file sharing (Share), file storage, (My Files), and PDF converter.
Well, whaddya know. They’ve certainly done a bang-up job marketing it.
They did run an ad campaign at launch, but it was fairly limited. Adobe has always had strange media buying habits. Because their success has been built on a couple of niche products for professionals, they’ve never really moved beyond that mindset (very focused advertising with messages that require prior knowledge) in their marketing.
In addition to the limited nature of their advertising, they didn’t do a very good job of blogosphere or business press PR. You hear a lot more about Zoho, despite the fact that it doesn’t work all that well, then you do about Acrobat.com.
This is also another feather in the cap for the Chrome OS. Just like Microsoft wants to control every aspect of a computing experience, Google too wants to have their fingers in every candy jar. Not only goes Chrome provide the ability to run web applications, but with HTML5’s video tag (http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-beta-why-slow-down-when-you-can.html) and a good codec, (that it wouldn’t surprise me if Google open sourced so Mozilla would be able to support it as well) one could have the entire world-class “web experience” on Google servers and software. I think we may one day have a better understanding of the word mono-culture, the question is, will anyone actually not want it?
And where does Apple fit into all of this?
A little background: When Steve Jobs ran NeXT, he adopted Display PostScript which Adobe had been pushing as the newest and best CRT display standard. Unfortunately, it was a proprietary standard and whenever Jobs needed to update the NeXT operating system or design a new computer, he had to wait for Adobe to send over a couple of programmers. These programmers worked behind a locked door at NeXT. This made updating NeXT OS a very difficult task, and Steve has never forgiven Adobe for tricking him into adopting Display PostScript.
Meanwhile, back at Apple, that company found itself being locked out of the World Wide Web and Email. Microsoft used its monopoly to practically take over the Internet. Microsoft started introducing Windows specific technology that only a Windows computer running Microsoft’s IE web browser could use. Many websites (at Microsoft’s insistence) actually blocked non Windows/IE computers from even looking into their website. This included Disney.com.
Apple and Steve Jobs are never going to let that happen again. Apple wants to make sure that the Internet is built upon open standards that will allow Apple to peddle it’s proprietary hardware to the masses.
There are several pieces here. The first is WebKit. This is an open source project created by Apple and is the basis of Apple’s Safari web browser. It is also the heart of Google Chrome’s web browser, the iPhone’s web browser, Google’s Android platform, and the Palm Pre web browser. WebKit is at the center of the new browsers wars. In reality, Chrome and Safari don’t compete with each other. Instead, they’re both the same weapon being used to ensure that all web browsers follow HTML5 to the letter. After all, Google doesn’t care if you use Chrome, and Apple doesn’t care if you use Safari since Google nor Apple make a penny off of either browser.
What is really going on is that both Apple and Google want to push open software standards for the Internet. Google wants open standards because they depend completely upon all of their applications working in your browser. Apple wants open standards because they want to sell you some nice high priced proprietary hardware, and you’re not going to buy that hardware if you can’t access websites or use it for email. So far, WebKit has been a smashing success. Even Microsoft has backed away from proprietary technology and is now promising to obey the HTML5 web standard.
The other is H.264. You notice that Adobe hasn’t made a flash plugin for the iPhone. It’s not because Adobe doesn’t want to. It is because Apple won’t let them. When the iPhone came out, Apple adopted H.264 as an “open” standard for Quicktime streaming. They also went to Google and had Google adopt H.264 for YouTube. You can watch YouTube videos over the iPhone, but not from the YouTube website. Instead, Google created a special YouTube application that displays YouTube videos using QuickTime and H.264.
Apple hates Flash, and so does Google. Flash (and Silverlight) are proprietary standards. If you want your Internet enabled device to use Flash you must wait for Adobe to build your device a Flash client. This is completely unacceptable to Apple and Google.
Both Apple and Google had been pushing the HTML5 standards committee to adopt H.264 as the standard streaming protocol and to expand both the HTML and JavaScript languages to allow for video streaming. Many open source advocates were pushing Ogg Theora because of patent issues that will prevent GPL projects from using H.264. Mozilla and Opera claim that H.264 licensing is too expensive. Apple claims that Ogg Theora is poorly supported in the hardware sector and refuses to support it. Google promised to support Ogg Theora, but has stated that YouTube will continue to use H.264.
Last month the HTML5 standard committee, in a blow to Apple and Google, decided they couldn’t come to an agreement upon the standard and will simply not specify a video codec standard for HTML5. This will allow Flash to be supported in HTML5 since any codec can be used.
I wonder if Google’s purchase of On2 was anyway related to the failure of HTML5 to adopt H.264 as a codec standard. By converting YouTube to H.264 and using Javascript, Google can create a YouTube that is no longer dependent upon Flash. Other websites could use Google’s Javascript library and experience to also create streaming sites that are also no longer dependent upon Flash. I am sure Google will use its resources to help various web sites with this goal. After all, if you want iPhone, Palm Pre, or Android users to see your website, you have to remove Flash from your website.
And I thought Apple was going to buy Adobe.
@DavidW Lol… Apple buy Adobe, you actually believed that?
Adobe is an old-world software developer, and we are no longer in the old world. Adobe’s web products like Flash and Acrobat are great, but they are proprietary and that means, like Display PostScript before, that platform developers are once again waiting for Adobe to send in the nerds.
Flash support is good on Windows, good on OS X, and MIA on virtually every other platform. Adobe has only so many nerds and it isn’t interested in blowing big bucks on developing redundant runtimes on every trendy OS out there.
Bottom line: short of Adobe being the first stop of the second coming, the only revelation of note is that Flash is dying, and Google is going to have something in place for when that happens. Whether or not Google gets it right remains to be seen – Google seems to straddle the line between 20th and 21st century development models, but not necessarily in a good way, so we may yet see the entrance of another player, which in turn is probably going to be a FLOSS effort or a company bent on competing by leaving no ground to capture.
Either way.. I have a popcorn maker and plenty of kernels, and this is going to be an interesting fight. Now it just remains to see who will be the bigger D-bag in the fight: Microsoft, or Google.
@Graham
I agree with most of what you said, but I’d like to point out that Flash is supported on Linux and OpenSolaris, and I’ve viewed Flash sites on both operating systems. There’s even an alpha version of 64-bit Flash available for Linux, the first ever 64-bit Flash plugin.
But yeah, considering that about 6 months ago Sun released a 64-bit Java plugin for all operating systems, and that Sun was criticized for being about 5 years late for doing so, not to mention that 64-bit Windows is now gaining traction (about half the PCs at Future Shop have 64-bit Vista installed) Adobe’s a little late to the party.
This is probably not as big as it sounds w.r.t. Adobe. It could be as simple as the fact that On2 charges a phenomenal license fee if your service directly allows a user to download an flv and save it on their machine for future playback – i.e. essentially “copying” the file. If google were to allow people to download videos, they, of all monster companies, could go bankrupt. An easy solution is to just buy the company out so you can dictate the license terms.
As far as I know, YouTube HQ videos use H.264 codec, not On2 VP6.
[…] Google und Adobe auf Kollisionskurs https://www.cringely.com/2009/08/google-taketh-away/ […]
Google is now in direct competition with MS (many fronts), Apple (Android, Chrome, recently announced OS), Adobe (video, various web standards), and EBay (Google Checkout, Google Voice).
Strikingly, Google makes little or no money in almost all these competitive fronts, and many – such as the browser, Android, and video technology – may never make money.
Powerful as Google is, they have many enemies, almost no partners, and really only one source of revenue that is under an unprecedented attack. IMO, Google is putting itself in an increasingly precarious position strategically.
Multiple-front wars _always_ turn out well for the aggressor!
I’m also wondering if this acquisition plays into the html5 codec questions. Ogg is truly open, but apparently its implementation isn’t there yet on mobile phones, which is why apple with its iPhone and Goog with Android and YouTube want to go on supporting h.264.
It’s also said that Ogg compression isn’t quite as good as h.264. But if goog were to roll this On2 compression into the Ogg standard, and further tweak it, they might be able to standardize the html5 video codec into pushing more Ogg’s way.
[…] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Google Taketh Away – Cringely on technologyCheck out the comments, too. […]
@pond: On2 is already part of Ogg Theora: On2 donated their compression technology to the Ogg project. In terms of quality, H.264 and Theora are nearly identical in their CPU usage. The question is whether or not On2 held the patents on the technology at the time they donated. If they did, big trouble is brewing.
In the short run, this will make it worse for HTML5 video. Apple is terrified that Ogg Theora has patent time bombs; they certainly are not trusting of Google and will double their resistance to folding Ogg into the HTML5 pseudo-standard.
In the long run, this is another nail in Mozilla’s coffin. Mozilla cannot afford to adopt H.264 as a built-in video standard, and now the only alternative is now owned by an increasingly hostile competitor. Google needs Mozilla to adopt HTML5 or to die off: Apple may get the press, but WebKit doesn’t have the number of users yet to make it economically viable to switch to a Flash-free distribution model. If Mozilla were to shut down from license taxes, most of the development resources would move to WebKit support and WebKit would quickly take the 20% user base that Mozilla currently enjoys. Google would like nothing more than to have WebKit be the dominant browser engine and force everyone else to follow, in much the same way that the quirks of Netscape’s broken parser had to be meticulously copied for Internet Explorer.
This is why I hate HTML5. Ostensibly it is a standard, but it really is an attempt to sanctify the WebKit approach to HTML as the “correct” interpretation (§9 of the preliminary specification is a particularly gratuitous example).
Hi Bob, Macromedia Flash Player added video in March 2002, and by June 2003 this version was already above 85% consumer support.
That’s when sites started using the new hassle-free video… video a first-class multimedia citizen, away from its little external box, integrated with text, graphics, audio and interactivity. Washington Post, Ben & Jerry’s, Yahoo, automobile manufacturers were some of the early adopters.
YouTube.com was reserved in Feb05, went beta in May05, into 1.0 in Nov05. This did usher in the age of consumer video, but may have been less a cause than a marker.
Today, YouTube’s unique monthly visitors remain smaller than Player installation rate:
https://www.lawyercasting.com/2009/03/youtube-gets-100-million-unique-visitors-in-january.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/emmy/archives/2008/08/two-four-six-ei.html
The key problem is NOT how to engineer something that runs on your own machine, but how to get something that renders on other peoples’ machines. The Adobe Flash Player enfranchises every browser brand, and is already supported by just about every consumer out there. Its strength is more than codec arguments.
(At this point someone says “Oh it’s not on my iPhone” and that’s true, but we expect to have the same codebase working across device form-factors at the end of this year, and in production next year, and for Apple, you’ll have to ask Steve Jobs about that.)
Summary: Google helped increase Flash’s increasing popularity, but it’s a stretch to think it’s willing or able “to take it away”. Its strength is in billions of decentralized consumer choices, millions of decentralized developer choices.
jd/adobe
It think “The Cringe” is comparing apples to elephants. Adobe’s strength (and market) is in content CREATION software, not delivery. There are no apps whatsoever that Google could even dream of developing that could compete with Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc. Adobe owns that market hands down. And even if Google did – I wouldn’t use them. I’m a daily user of nearly every Adobe app – they work, are the standard, and no batch of Googlegeeks no matter how large is going to change my mind.
I see Google as the next in line to IBM and Microsoft. Both got so huge thet nearly collapsed under their own weight. This is why MS is so paranoid about Google – they know they are too big to react to anything Google does in even the slightest competitive way. Bing ain’t no Google and MS is scared to death.
But I think Google itself is getting way to big for its britches – they are becoming an overpowering behemoth and nobody likes anybody that big and powerful.
[…] I, Cringely […]
[…] I, Cringely: “It is important to remember that Flash video was not a significant competitor until it was embraced by the pre-Google YouTube. Flash video simply wasn’t that good. It relied on an antiquated H.263 codec that was originally intended for video conferencing and, while fast, was of not particularly good quality. But quality didn’t matter to the early YouTube, just fast and reliable streaming connections, which a video conferencing codec could provide. …The lower quality of streaming video had the industry broadly turning away from streaming, moving to the download delivery model championed by Apple with iTunes. Then YouTube changed everything seemingly overnight.” Share and Enjoy: […]
I’m just happy that Real is nowhere to be found in this argument;)
[…] https://www.cringely.com/2009/08/google-taketh-away/ (Google 買下 On2), Flash 以前的 codec 是 On2 做的. Ogg Vorbis 也是 On2 捐出來改的. […]
I’m surprised you still think these international corporations are competing. I know most people do but not me. It simply makes more sense that just like politics it is easier to control everything when you have two “competitors”. That also makes it far easier to relieve investors of their money by moving your own while driving stock prices up and down with media coverage.
you should have search for facts first…cause your new is completely false
google dont use on2 codec on youtube, they use H.264…
come on… and you write news?
It is important to remember that Flash video was not a significant competitor until it was embraced by the pre-Google YouTube. Flash video simply wasn’t that good. It relied on an antiquated H.263 codec that was originally intended for video conferencing and, while fast, was of not particularly good quality. But quality didn’t matter to the early YouTube, just fast and reliable streaming connections, which a video conferencing codec could provide.
sorgulama, hesaplama836