Google's Schmidt perplexed by Facebook blather, still fears MS Outgoing Google boss Eric Schmidt is perplexed by people who keep suggesting that Facebook is now Mountain View's biggest rival. It's not – Microsoft is, says Schmidt. We at Vulture Towers think that's a pretty obvious statement of fact, but Uncle Eric is a bit narked that Facebook is stealing so much thunder from Google's …
FB are blocking an area into which Google would like to move, and with a dreadfully inferior offering. This paper by Google ( http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2 ) gets nearer to how our social networks operate in Real Life™ while FB essentially treats your friends list as a uniform set: no groupings associated with different areas of your life, nor any sort of closeness discrimination.
Facebook's dominance is based on its being "first to market" - in the Gartner hype cycle, they are right at the "peak of inflated expectations". Whether they will survive past the "trough of disillusionment" in the next couple of years will be instructive to watch.
FB's security controls were never meant to be there at all bcoz Zuckerberg wanted it all to be completely out in the open & believed it all to belong to him. All of the security aspects of FB have been add-ons rather than what Google's WAVE was. This was a far more controllable piece of software usable as social networking or secure inter-operations between coders & the like. It's a shame no-one got it when it first came out...
Half of Google's top engineers come from Microsoft anyway. Everything people hated Microsoft doing they do at Google much more aggressively and everyone loves them for it!
It's all part of the great merry-go-round of engineers between Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle etc.
at over 89 % (http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-daily-20080801-20110131) and both Bing and Yahoo struggling along at about 4 % each, Facebook's «pretty cosy relationship with Microsoft's Bing» doesn't seem to be having a pronounced effect on the search-engine business. Perhaps Mr Schmidt is correct ?...
Henri
that's why he got 'kicked' (up).. I have to agree FB has the goods and momentum to topple Google's place in the cloud. In the ad revenue space, stats is everything and FB, IMHO has a deeper sense of the users relationships and 'likes' than google. 500Million users and user generated content? that's a lot of data to mine and monetize.
As for MS, their days are numbered as being the number one IT company.. in my org, small as it is, our next cycle of HW purchases will be all without Windows products having migrated all our apps to the web (and using OpenOffice for > 3 years now).
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