I disagree. I worked at Google for a year in 2010, around the time of the first reorgs around social. They were decimating teams like Calendar, Sites, and other products with millions of users that were stagnating, as far as they were concerned, and building a team 200-strong to take on "social" -- whatever that means. We joked that no one at Google knew what it meant. We felt Google was deeply clueless about the nature of social networking products. The restructuring was very top-down and heavy-handed, and it was apparently just the beginning.
In fact, if you're looking for hindsight vs reality, I don't think Google and Facebook really were competitors -- until Google decided to build a copy of Facebook's product. So what if both sites were monetized with ads, whoop-dee-doo. The overlap in their product functionality and expertise was basically zero. There's a very abstract connection that comes out of Google's central dogma: We are how people find things on the Internet. We are how they discover links. We're their homepage. What if Facebook takes all of that away? We have to eat their lunch.
Google acted out of some combination of fear, insecurity, and pressure from Wall Street, along with some grandiose thinking about their role in the universe and the threat of Facebook. I believe the changes inside Google are significant, and also not inevitable or "what anyone would have done at the time." We'll see how the effects play out.
"In fact, if you're looking for hindsight vs reality, I don't think Google and Facebook really were competitors -- until Google decided to build a copy of Facebook's product."
Respectfully, I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Google saw Facebook as a potential identity platform and de facto backend for the entire web. It might have been paranoid in its assumptions of just how much of Google's lunch Facebook could have eaten -- but the move into social was very much a defensive move, not an offensive one. They weren't trying to eat Facebook's lunch; they were trying not to get theirs eaten.
It's (still) not a stretch to think that advertisers would transfer dollars on a zero-sum basis from AdSense to a Facebook-credentialed web. As for AdWords? That's a harder lunch for Facebook to steal, but it's not inconceivable.
"Google acted out of some combination of fear, insecurity..."
Smart companies should be afraid and insecure, to some degree, about potential competition. I highly recommend Andy Grove's excellent book "Only the Paranoid Survive."
"...pressure from Wall Street..."
Just the opposite. Wall Street wanted Google to keep milking the cash cow and trying to expand its market share overseas -- which is a pretty typical Wall Street-pleasing playbook. Wall Street likes steady expansion of existing markets; Wall Street hates big bets in unproven products or markets.
Google saw Facebook as a potential identity platform and de facto backend for the entire web. It might have been paranoid in its assumptions of just how much of Google's lunch Facebook could have eaten -- but the move into social was very much a defensive move, not an offensive one.
I realize this is what Google felt, and what also seems to be accepted wisdom in the Valley, but I just don't get the logic that leads to cloning Facebook.
I do sometimes forget the whole thing about how the "advertisers (not the users) are the customer," so maybe I was wrong that they weren't competitive from that point of view.
Are we approaching a world where Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft each have their own phone, tablet, set-top box, search engine, email service, maps service, login, and "universal identity" for the web? Why does every tech company past a certain size need one of all of these things to be "competitive"?
"...pressure from Wall Street..."
Google execs were always in search of the "next billion-dollar product," so their stock would keep going up, so their employees' options would go up. It's a direct consequence of the mindset that company health equals X% growth that if you are taking over the planet in one category, you have to take over the planet in another category before long or be declared a failing company. Companies like Google try to shape the numbers as best they can to tell the story Wall Street wants to hear, but it's difficult and in the long run leads to extreme contortions.
The only way Google can get a bigger slice of "social" is if they invent and build something so subtle, so out-of-the-way, so unobtrusive... that people don't realize they are using it.
Instead, they've been very forceful with their attempts to bring people in (Google+ is a great example), and that's clearly not working. It's bad enough that people scrutinize their every move (evil, too much data, etc), but to make matters worse, Google then starts acting like a used car salesman.
> The only way Google can get a bigger slice of "social" is if they invent and build something so subtle, so out-of-the-way, so unobtrusive... that people don't realize they are using it.
ironically, you just described their first and main product.
Perhaps it's not so easy to do the same with social.
(Not saying that forcing people to convert is not a good move)
In fact, if you're looking for hindsight vs reality, I don't think Google and Facebook really were competitors -- until Google decided to build a copy of Facebook's product. So what if both sites were monetized with ads, whoop-dee-doo. The overlap in their product functionality and expertise was basically zero. There's a very abstract connection that comes out of Google's central dogma: We are how people find things on the Internet. We are how they discover links. We're their homepage. What if Facebook takes all of that away? We have to eat their lunch.
Google acted out of some combination of fear, insecurity, and pressure from Wall Street, along with some grandiose thinking about their role in the universe and the threat of Facebook. I believe the changes inside Google are significant, and also not inevitable or "what anyone would have done at the time." We'll see how the effects play out.