This is really a great piece of analysis. I don't have anything to add at all. Basically, becoming a platform is where both companies need to go, and start mon

This is really a great piece of analysis. I don't have anything to add at all. Basically, becoming a platform is where both companies need to go, and start monetizing that platform. But unfortunately for Google, they are much further away from being that than FB is. I would go so far as to say that Google has utterly failed to figure out a good diversification strategy -- at this point, they just dump something out there and slap some targeted ads on it. But outside of search and gmail, they don't really have much of interest they can monetize on. Google Apps might be their next billion dollar product line, if they can turn it into something decent. Enterprises are where lots of money is at, but their enterprise offerings are really rather lousy. I'm actually sometimes flabberghasted at how much wasted potential Google has in terms of obvious monetize-able offerings they have in their basket, but all of them are treated like incomplete one-off projects done on employee's 20%...with vast stretches of time between obvious enhancements and/or some necessary things never getting built at all. FB, on the other hand, has the platform but isn't doing anything with it that's readily monetize-able, and they can manage to keep people at the site, but there's really not a whole heck of a lot for people to actually spend money on. Once again, I don't understand why something like Ping or Pandora/last.fm isn't a central part of FB's strategy. It's like a videogame console with only 1 or 2 games.