But now there appears to be a difference.

What Google is doing by paying $1.65 billion for a not-yet-profitable startup is declaring that if you do have market share -- meaning millions of visitors -- that alone can turn into huge revenues, thanks to Internet advertising. Perhaps Internet advertising just wasn't ready for prime time in the 1990s. But whatever the reason, Google bought YouTube because it owns almost 46 percent of all visits to video Web sites.

YouTube gets something like 100 million page views per day. Does it matter that 99 percent of them are a waste of time? That these homemade videos have no redeeming quality? Not in the slightest. To whom should it matter?

Google and its competitors are fighting for market share because, now, market share in and of itself means success. From now on, "the next big thing" will not mean great technology; it will mean whichever online entity can come up with the most "viewers."

If that means the content is at the bottom of the intelligence barrel, you won't hear investors complaining and you will see a lot of copycats. But what you won't see are inventive twenty-somethings putting their skills toward coming up with innovative technology to change our lives.