Facebook's plan to beat Google+
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Facebook exec Chris Cox: Here’s our plan to beat Google+
Circa summer 2010
Abridged History of Google and Facebook
Sometime in the summer of 2007, Larry stopped talking to Mark. This was following an 8 month period in which we launched News Feed, opened registration to everyone, and launched Platform. Almost instantly, we were competing with Google for talent, for developer mindshare, and for tech-blog-cred. They began to worry about their ability to enter new markets with us in the game, and about core investments that weren’t doing well and that we were positioned to touch: Checkout, Local, Orkut. They worried about entrenched products that we might one day challenge: Calendar, Picasa, Youtube, Blogger, Reader, News, and about the Comscore data telling them the “social networks are bigger than email” story. Facebook had the world’s people, while Google had only their cookies: so we were better positioned even to own Search and Ads one day. Oh my!
So far, we haven’t seen the real competition. Open Social, Wave, Latitude, and Buzz were all lobs. By design, they had low chances of breakaway success and lacked depth as fleshed-out social products. They weren’t built by Google’s best people and they weren’t coddled and raised by its founders. They were test matches.
