Joel 跟 Paul Graham 分別對一些新興 web application 的看法：
Joel on Software - Too Many Ajax Calendars
They're building calendar companies to sell to Yahoo!, which, for some reason, has given up on the old concept of hiring programmers to write code, and is going with this new age concept of buying entire companies on the hopes that they might contain a good programmer or two, which, by the way, is a sure sign of trouble for a technology company.
Google may be even more dangerous than Microsoft, because unlike Microsoft it's the favorite of technically minded users. When Microsoft launched an application to compete with yours, the first users they'd get would alway be the least sophisticated-- the ones who just used whatever happened to be already installed on their computer. But a startup that tries to compete with Google will have to fight for the early adopters that startups can ordinarily treat as their birthright.
結論是：如果你不能像 YouTube 有自己獨特的經營方式，跟 Google 硬碰硬或是等著被收購都不是個明智的選擇。