As someone that lived through it, two things stuck with me
1. YouTube just worked, it relied on Flash and that was installed on almost every computer. IIRC google video required some other plugin and it didn’t work great.
2. There was a lot more content to watch, probably because they were less good at filtering copyrighted content.
My memories are that Google Video worked fine without additional plugins, but I primarily used it to consume Google content (primarily their tech talks), documentaries, etc... YouTube really was all about short home-made videos.
The UX on Youtube was generally better.
One thing I did like in Google Video though, was that it allowed to download copies of the videos easily to save local copies. That appealed to the data-hoarder in me, I suppose.
The California DOI is requiring that companies issue some sort of "reasonable" refund, which has to be justified to the department in some way. Other states will likely do something similar.
Don't forgoet that the monopoly comes at the cost that they are required to keep a lot of post offices open in rural areas, which is a very unprofitable enterprise.
Couldn't the government just directly build and manage post offices in such rural areas, and stay out of the postal business in more populous regions? If the problem is insufficient postal services in some regions, it makes more sense to just fund postal services in those regions than to place a blanket ban on postal competition across the whole nation.
But then the government would be operating the rural postal service at a pure loss, rather than using the profitable parts of the postal service to fund the unprofitable parts. That would mean higher taxation with no extra benefits.
There'd be the huge extra benefit of dramatically cheaper postal services for people in metropolitan areas, due to competition. The 'profitable' parts of the postal service are profitable because of its status as a monopoly, and represent a deadweight loss to consumers. If rural post was funded by taxation, at least the burden would be distributed more fairly, instead of primarily upon people using metropolitan postal services.
Seems the Android guys are facing the same problems with Groovy in their Gradle based build system, and the Gradle team are considering switching to Scala for Gradle 2 to keep Android on board.
1. YouTube just worked, it relied on Flash and that was installed on almost every computer. IIRC google video required some other plugin and it didn’t work great.
2. There was a lot more content to watch, probably because they were less good at filtering copyrighted content.