The secret of comedy

There's been a lot said about the GooSpace deal these past few days, so much in fact that I'm reluctant to stir the pot again, but here's one last thought to mull over. Would YouTube have cost Google $1.65 billion if they hadn't announced their $900 million MySpace deal first? Or to put it another way, has Google just wasted an awful lot of shareholder money by doing its deals in the wrong order?

A lot of analyst questions (SeekingAlpha) have focused on the relationship that Google has just created between MySpace and YouTube; the deal metrics, or the $1.65 billion price-tag, have been at least partly justified by comparisons with the Google/MySpace deal (that MySpace will, just to say it again, never deliver on). Just how much of that $1.65 billion could Google have saved with a modicum of better timing?