10 ms·
How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War on Google Plus
- nibs 10y agoTL/DR: An interesting, adjective-heavy story about how Facebook and Zuckerburg responded to the Google+ competitive threat between 2012-2014. Zuck likened it to Roman conquering and Facebook went temporarily into "Lockdown" with seven day workweeks. Anecdotes suggest Facebook worked Sundays more often than Google. Otherwise pretty light on content.
- mgiannopoulos 10y agoThe title looked suspicious to say the least. Thanks for taking the time to write this.
- dukoid 10y agoI really hate this kind of article. Good writing has a summary of the most important stuff at the top and then drills down into various interesting aspects. Thanks for the TL/DR, I had given up after the first paragraph.
- zellyn 10y agoCertain kinds of good writing do. Many kinds do not.
- HillaryBriss 10y agoI think you may be describing the difference between newspaper-style journalism on the one hand and magazine-style journalism on the other. That said, I pretty much agree with you. I've lost my patience for magazine-style journalism.
- antongm 10y agoIt's safe to say the target audience of this piece was not the Hacker News demographic. More product dev detail would have lost most people. Unfortunately.
- tmalsburg2 10y agoThank you. I stopped reading after a few paragraphs in which the author discussed several different definitions of the word genius and where he listed things that Zuckerberg is not. It was pretty clear that the author was desperately trying to fill the pages.
- draw_down 10y agoI can't imagine ever loving my employer this much. And heaven help whoever tells me I'm on "lockdown" so I can't leave the building and I have to work weekends.
- gdulli 10y agoI don't think anyone loved their employer that much. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I'll assume there was lots of eye rolling on both sides as their leaders rallied them all around the idea of trading users cat pictures for their ad impressions. Your salary/equity/etc. vs. your value on your personal life either make overtime worth it or not.
- draw_down 10y ago> Your salary/equity/etc. vs. your value on your personal life either make overtime worth it or not. Precisely, in a way.
- rajahafify 10y agoWell, its not that hard to imagine. For hundreds if not thousands of years, people has been fighting to the deaths for their lords and kings. A few weekends is nothing really.
- yanilkr 10y agoLike someone else said. Love your job, but do not fall in love with your employer. You never know when your employer stops loving you.
- kristopolous 10y agoI'm not even on board with the first one. It's a financial transaction for my services. I'll be nice and polite, but I'm not going to enter into some personal relationship where I can be pressured to tender those services as a favor or for some kind of social capital.
- 10y ago
- samwestdev 10y agoAre lockdown even legal in the US?
- wmeredith 10y agoEh, they probably can't legally make you stay, but they can certainly fire your ass for leaving.
- EpicEng 10y ago>Eh, they probably can't legally make you stay I mean, they absolutely cannot. We have a term for that; it's called 'kidnapping'.
- dragonwriter 10y agoActually, its "false imprisonment". "Kidnapping" is different.
- will_brown 10y agoUnder False Imprisonment FB could lock the employees in, just as long as the employees didn't know they were locked in at the time of being locked in (i.e. they only found out later after FB unlocked them) ;)
- EpicEng 10y agoDepends on the state, but I don't think you're correct. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=difference%20between%20false%20imprisonment%20and%20kidnapping https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
- mike_hock 10y agoWrongful dismissal?
- flyt 10y agoNo, and this isn't what Facebook did internally. "Lockdown" was more of a way of thinking about the problem and cover for working longer hours rather than literally locking the doors to prevent people from going home.
- KingNoosh 10y agoWas it really a war? I don't believe anyone thought Google Plus would've actually stood a chance, and now it looks like G+ is splitting to many little micro-services such as spaces, Allo and Duo. Not the mention the whole YouTube users being constantly harassed to input their real name which gave G+ an even worse taste in their mouths.
- whack 10y agoYes, it was a war. There were plenty of earlier social networks, like Friendster and Myspace, who probably looked down at upstarts like Facebook, shortly before getting killed by them. Facebook was in a good position, but it certainly wasn't invincible. And Google isn't just any competitor. This was back in the days when Google could do no wrong. They conquered the world in search. They conquered the world in email. They were starting to conquer the world in mobile. They had some of the best engineering talent in the world. And they were now pointing all their guns at Facebook. I can certainly imagine why Zuck was shitting bricks. Kudos to him for pulling out a win.
- gdulli 10y agoI'm not sure, but my instinct is that Google's decline had started by then. Sure, they bought their way into email by giving away storage when everyone else was charging for it. But the usability had steadily gotten worse over time. When did the new compose experience launch compared to G+, for example?
- dredmorbius 10y agoGoogle's slide toward doing wrong started earlier, and you can argue over when, but I'd attribute it to Gmail. It's one thing to have my search history. It's another to have my search history, identity, and email. I resisted the pull of Gmail for a long time. Yes, I created an account (to forstall others from doing so, and, oddly, a highly distinctive name proved taken in multiple iterations, or at least unavailable, when I tried registering it). I've simply moved to using email very little. G+ put the stink in though. I really wanted to like the service. I used it early on, and still do. I wanted it to be the anti- Facebook (which I do not use, or trust). But multiple from the top decisions made, and still make it, exceptionally difficult to like. Sadly, there's little better (and I've looked).
- wmeredith 10y ago"That unfortunate first impression, plus the mischaracterization in the film The Social Network, was probably responsible for half of the ever present suspicion and paranoia surrounding Facebook’s motives. But occasionally Zuck would have a charismatic moment of lucid greatness, and it would be stunning." The lockdown thing is interesting, but you have to wade through this blathering, fawning, puff-piece nonsense. There are many more such gag-inducing sections in this piece. Good luck.
- dave2000 10y agoI read about "facebook's motives" and other companies motives, and suspicions about this and that in the media and I think - why do people bother? Companies like Facebook and Google and Apple have billions of users and 99.999% of them just do not give a shit about any of this drama. If they didn't like Facebook (or Android, or... etc) they'd just stop using it. I guess it's just "gotta write a story....gotta make a dollar...gotta get some ad impressions" or whatever, but..really..does anyone actually give a shit?
- beagle3 10y ago> If they didn't like Facebook (or Android, or... etc) they'd just stop using it. I don't like Android, and I am not using it. But I have to use facebook because some real life events that I should attend are organized on Facebook. Similarly WhatsApp. I give it no permissions, which makes it a little awkward as I have to memorize (or lookup) phone numbers; But I have missed several important announcements when I wasn't on WhatsApp.
- billmalarky 10y agoIt was worth the read for me to learn about this story alone in my opinion https://www.quora.com/How-did-Chris-Putnam-get-hired-at-Facebook?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-did-Chris-Putnam-get-hired-at-Face...
- aoeuasdf1 10y agoThanks for saving me the time!
- areyoucrazy 10y agoThis is cargo-culting. Do you really think FB's success is due to frequent lockdowns? They are successful because they've got network effects, people are used to using their site/app and there is no incentive for people to switch - it's already free, you can't go lower than that.
- will_brown 10y ago>it's already free, you can't go lower than that. You could give the users ownership of the multibillion dollar platform whose monetary value only exists because of its users.
- ajoy39 10y agoI don't follow this train of thought. Did those users make facebook? Run it's servers? write it's code? Sell it's ad space? Every product and service in the world only exists because of consumers, but there's nothing owed between the parties. Facebook provides a platform for it's users. The users use it. They don't own it anymore than you should "owe" your local grocery store because you buy vegetables there
- will_brown 10y agoI didn't say Facebook exits bc its users. I said its monetary value exists bc its users. Have you ever bought Facebook ads? The users are what's being sold, not the ad (i.e. FB doesn't make the ad, but asks you what users you want to see the ad). I'm not saying FB owes me anything, but niether does YouTube who manages a revenue sharing program with its content creators (users). Btw those users didn't create YouTube, run their servers, write the code, etc...
- ajoy39 10y agoYoutube isn't a social network.
- onewaystreet 10y ago
- 6stringmerc 10y agoYou know, back when I riffed on the great poem "Ozymandias" in the context of Zuckerberg and Facebook[1] I thought maybe, just maybe I was over-reaching on the whole ego-drive thing with Zuckerberg, but after reading this, not so much. [1] https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/zuckermandias-d1fa241c4d56#.akyodf12g https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/zuckermandias-d1fa241c4d56#....
- CamperBob2 10y agoI don't think anyone really gets that poem, possibly not even Shelley himself. The words remain. And maybe that's all ol' Ozy wanted to leave behind.
- 6stringmerc 10y agoNo no no no that poem is very clear. Ozy built a giant statue to himself to lord over all that he ruled upon. When the narrator came across the inscription, all that was left was the pedestal and the feet of the once giant statue. Just as the statue had disappeared into the sands of time - while the inscription of bragging remained - so had the kingdom. The point of the poem is akin to "the bigger they are the harder they fall" if you will.
- fishnchips 10y agoZuck should have read Sun Tzu instead of Cato - "If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by." I'm not sure how much of the G+ failure can really be attributed to any particular activity of FB as a company.
- joe_the_user 10y agoYeah, it seems like launching G+ as a Google integration product to force people into G+ was dumb step one (so G+ wound-up immediately disliked by more people than it was liked, including me as involuntary recruit). It seems like Google's in-practice more draconian real names policy was dumb step two. The "social must be everything" Mantra that Google was chanting then was annoying and ridiculous. But part of the situation was the company didn't want to just create a useful service for people but rather wanted to impose a situation where people's identities could be monetized by Google. Facebook has had trouble monetizing their product and I suspect they're safe because every company with the resources to produce a UI and service as useful as Facebook is going to want have such a service impose more conditions, be oriented towards quicker monetization, etc. Even MySpace could have persisted if they'd focused on providing things Facebook didn't - but no one wanted to extend credit to them to do and creating this stuff apparently costs a lot of money for a significant amount of time.
- tacos 10y ago"Surfers patting each other on the back for pushing the waves closer to shore."
- amaks 10y agoI agree, it looks like the demise of Google+ is direct effect of mismanagement by Vic and integrating everything (YouTube, Gmail etc.), not any kind of Zuck's "genius".
- antongm 10y agoI know that proverb via a popular Spanish version, and I do quote it in the book, though not in reference to Google Plus.
- unfunco 10y agoAgreed, my cringe-pipes have ruptured. It was nice of Facebook to acknowledge the author of this article on the roof of their headquarters though.[0] People were suspicious before the film, Facebook is an immoral business, and Mark Zuckerberg is nothing more than the world's most notorious panty-sniffer. [0]: http://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5750966534d59c8547b429f5/master/w_900,c_limit/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-chaos-monkeys-06-2016-02.jpg http://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5750966534d59c8547b429f5/...
- antongm 10y agoIt's actually in the courtyard they have HACK written, not the roof. You need some copy editing.
- dang 10y agoYou can't make personal attacks like this on HN. Also, gross. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11832595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11832595 and marked it off-topic.
- wonkaWonka 10y agoUh, pretty obvious that Google Plus just wasn't a product that could stand on it's own merit. Just like Microsoft's terrible tablets weren't done in by any other tablet maker, and were cursed with enough problems to get a cold shoulder at the cash register. I don't even use Facebook, but it's pretty obvious that it's purpose built to do specific things, and does them well, if that's what your Jonesing for.
- reitanqild 10y ago> Uh, pretty obvious that Google Plus just wasn't a product that could stand on it's own merit. Honest question: how was this obvious?
- wonkaWonka 10y agoYou could tell, open handed, that people would not be interested in the idea of the product, by the way it was executed, by the undertones of its justification for existence. It was a product mandated for the sake of a company's bucket list at best. To earn a gold star for trying. To mark off a checkbox. The whole thing reeked of groupthink, from a mile away. Censored behavior. Courting celebrities. Requiring real names. Activities restrained by pretense. It stank of corporate influence, of lunchtime business meetings, of shareholder concern. Poochie the dog, rastafied by 10% or so. Nothing about it felt natural. Everyone has to wear clothes. No cursing please. Place your cigarette in the appropriate receptacle. Worse still, all things were clearly designed to funnel back into some other thing at Google that was more impotant to the bottom line. Endorsements, trending interests, who's reading what, written by who, and so forth. It wasn't designed to tickle the user. None of that is why people come to the internet and keep coming back. Not regular people. You could tell that the people invloved in crafting the reason for Google Plus' existence were people who pay their taxes. Who drive safely, even if they drive expensive cars. Who spend their lives trapped inside a ribbed condom. Yeah, it's a condom, but it's a ribbed condom. So much better! Facebook is also guilty of many of these sins, but it's what they do, it's ALL they do, and they don't get in the way of people behaving badly, or at least not in ways that would preclude them from just trying to have fun on a website they don't actually need to use. And that's where Google really crossed the line, by trying to needle people into jumping on the Google Plus bandwagon, and then by telling them to sit all proper and cross-legged too.
- notifier2050 10y agoOmg, link to Vanity Fair on HN...
- danso 10y agoHuh? Vanity Fair is a frequent source of important and interesting journalism...they've been writing a lot recently about the tech scene, but have also had classics such as: http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1996/05/wigand199605 http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1996/05/wigand199605
- michaelbuddy 10y agoFacebook didn't need to do much. Google Plus was frightfully annoying on its own. It made no sense to people the on boarding process, to the point where google plus made it easier to create new google plus accounts, people didn't want, without their knowledge than it was to get help from google on anything.
- tdkl 10y agoAs many have said already G+ did the job on its own. But what's also important was the crucial time at launch. These were the days when the people coming to Facebook in 2008, 2009 were a bit fed up by it and wanted to try something else with hosting pictures, events etc. So they actually were the most interested in trying in out, hey it was a Google product and everyone loved Gmail. But Google screwed up and placed an invite system. I don't know if they weren't prepared for the scale or wanted to copy Gmail (it worked once, amirite!) or the Facebook being exclusive at their beginning. The times were different though and if you slam the door before someone eager to try out your stuff, guess what, he won't come back. So after couple months when the invites were a bit more reachable, the initial interest was wasted and left an aftertaste in people. And you don't want that.
- rezashirazian 10y agoMaking a social media platform invite only was such an obvious mistake, I'm surprised a company like Google made it. The product in G+ was not the platform but the potential social element of it (the user's friends and family). "Hey here is an invite to this thing that none of your friends can get on"
- dredmorbius 10y ago1. Yes, Facebook have won the Social war. To date. 2. Yes, Zuckerberg managed to avoid technical errors and tarpits, mostly, to get there. 3. No, the "Lockdown" thing had little to do with it. If anything it may well have been counterproductive. 4. God what a horribly written, horribly analysed piece of glurge this is. 5. Harvard. 6. Google shot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly. With tremendous technical ability. With tremendous effect. Taking a service I wanted to like, wanted to find useful, and wanted to support, and uttershly gobshiting it. Put the blame squarely at the feet of Vic Gundotra. And more squarely: at the feet of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. The rot does straight to the top. All four men did a tremendous disservice to Google, torpedoed massive amounts of brand equity and consumer trust, and have done very, very, very little to redeem it. I've dug at G+, critiqued it, analysed it, and compared it with other alternatives. All in the hopes of finding a decent goddamned place for intelligent conversation online. Hell if I know where it's at. (HN is a small piece, but only a small piece, and not without its own major faults.) More: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/SCqMujFZC5b https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/SCqMujFZ...
- abalone 10y ago> How about Facebook’s first version of Search... mostly useful for checking out your friends’ single female friends A minor dig but this is the sort of subtle male-centric POV that should be filtered out of tech journalism. Straight women use Facebook too, check out profiles. What's more, they constitute 4/5ths of Vanity Fair's readership.[1] This is speaking to women, subtly telling them that tech is mainly tools for guys. Comes up all the time in other contexts. Like I was watching Tinker Bell the other day, and it's basically 100% femmy fairy girls EXCEPT they made the nerdy techy builder characters boys. I'm like, come on... [1] http://www.condenast.com/brands/vanity-fair/media-kit/print http://www.condenast.com/brands/vanity-fair/media-kit/print
- danso 10y agoFWIW, this piece is an adaptation/excerpt from a book written by "former Facebook employee Antonio García Martínez". He may only be repeating hearsay, of course, but he may have also been privy to the analytics or internal discussion that indicated how Search was being used.
- antongm 10y agoYeah, I'm not speculating. This was the most popular query. No bigger implications meant to the observation.
- rwallace 10y agoWhen you're up against a strong incumbent, don't attack your opponent where he is strongest, or at least don't do that in the opening game. Look for where he is weak instead. Google+ didn't lose because Facebook used any particular counter-attack. It lost because it basically set out to copy Facebook, which constituted an attack where Facebook was strongest; why would anyone use it when they could use the original, which had more people on it? Google should have tried doing something different. Maybe drop the real names policy, maybe allow open programmatic access, I don't know enough about the domain to be able to say for sure exactly what, but they needed to provide some reason for at least some percentage of users to switch.
- palakchokshi 10y agoThis is a fluff piece, that much is certain. To summarize it 1. Mark Zuckerberg is the Messiah, albeit with human traits of failure. (Makes a messiah more relatable) 2. Google pooh poohs Facebook 3. Google sits up and takes notice as Facebook's users pick up and Vic Gundotra's kids and their friends tell Vic that Facebook is where they are at and Vic goes to Larry Page and whispers warnings in his ears. 4. Larry bestows knighthood on Vic to wage war on Facebook. 5. Vic looks at the Google Landscape and thinks "I bet I can get 400 million users by bombarding Google properties with G+ buttons but that would be too easy so I am going to only allow people with invites to become users. Come on I need a challenge!!" 6. Zuckerberg looks at G+ and Google's search users and thinks "Holy God in Heaven! My flock is under attack" 7. Zuckerberg ushers his flock into the pen and closes the gates. 8. The flock sits in the pen and does what they had been doing though a little more carefully now. 9. Vic looks at the barren landscape of G+ and thinks "There's no one here. I better put cardboard cutouts of people here so Larry doesn't revoke my knighthood" 10. Mark's flock looks at the cutouts and laughs their asses off. They drink some more Kool Aid. 11. G+ is burned to the ground by all the bombardment Vic did and Vic tucks tail and leaves. 12. Mark opens the gates of the pen and his flock are let out and they rejoice. The author of this article thinks Mark is a genius for herding all his flock into the pen and hunkering down. 13. "That's how you "lead" wars, bitch", proclaims the Messiah. sarcasm
- antongm 10y agoSure took a while to summarize all that fluff.
- palakchokshi 10y agoever tried to compress cotton candy into a solid ball? it takes a while :)
- puffpiece 10y agoLots of flowery language and very little substance
- antongm 10y agoFrom a guy with the username puffpiece, that's really amusing commentary.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- leonroy 10y agoTo be honest Zuckerberg could've taken an annual sabbatical and it wouldn't have made a jot of difference to Google Plus's future. When G+ came out Facebook was pretty damn popular amongst my peers and younger friends and colleagues. G+ had some interest I'll grant you but the big question to everyone I know was 'Why? I have Facebook.' Despite that I and a lot of friends signed up. The problem was that Google's social network felt like a geeky waste land. Like a place where you post things that you don't care if anyone else sees. Pity because from what I understand their photos app has uncanny facial recognition and auto tagging capabilities. Their email clearly is solid. Hangouts is also pretty damn good. Google have so much opportunity in the social space if they could tie all these services together in a compelling way but they really seem to be missing some key ingredients - thoughtful leadership perhaps?
- beagle3 10y agoThe tie in was flakier in the past, and at some points in time was done in a strong-arming way, which killed a lot of goodwill (YouTube unification, real name policy -- enforced from day 1 much more vigorously than Facebook and applying to old gmail accounts, ...) and there was not enough to start with anyway). Couple that with the Buzz fiasco before it .... But that would not have mattered if FB wasn't there. The real problem is network effect: Most people were already on Facebook, and maintaining two presences (FB and G+) was a chore. So most people kept to FB. Everyone I know kept their main profile on FB, and had a "professional" or "interest-based" profile on G+, which naturally saw about 10% or less activity.
- amaks 10y ago"Google Circles, a way of organizing social contacts, shamelessly copied from Facebook’s long-ignored Lists feature." I thought it was the other way around - circles were based on a research by a guy from Google, who left later for Facebook and they built similar feature.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoI feel like the headline and intro to this piece are misleading. It doesn't actually describe anything Zuck did product-wise, or how the fight actually played out. It's just some anecdotes about what Facebook was like during this period and a lot of pretty grand statements about Zuckerberg.