
Google, H.264 and Sticking it to Apple - spiffworks
http://expletiveinserted.com/2011/01/15/google-h-264-and-sticking-it-to-apple/
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ZeroGravitas
A surprisingly reasonable take considering the title and url.

However, I'd suggest there's a bit more joined up thinking going on at Google
than this narrative suggests. Spending $130 million to create a royalty free
contender for web video and convincing world plus dog to support it seems
above the pay grade of any individual unit.

It wouldn't surprise me if this advance announcement was intended to coincide
with Youtube finishing their WebM encoding and Youtube in some way promoting
their HTML5 interface and WebM along with it. Not in a brutal, shut of H.264
completely way, but I can see them dropping it from the HTML5 stuff while
still serving it via Flash and clients such as iOS and Android, and possibly
making the HTML5 stuff desirable in some small way. But his main point stands,
that sticking it to Apple doesn't really cut it as a plausible theory.

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GregCox
Agree that Google's action across Chrome/YouTube/Android is probably a little
more coordinated than I suggested in the post. I read so many articles that
anthropomorphize large companies and spin stories where they are hypocritical,
vengeful, envious, etc. where the truth is that they are just loosely
connected, somewhat coordinated networks of people like you and me that are
making decisions and getting on with it. Pundits have always done this (makes
for juicy stories and good traffic), but it seems to be getting worse than
ever with the Google / Apple narrative. I guess I ended up swinging the
pendulum too far in the other direction.

