Interesting indeed.
Fun departure point for thinking about other similarities and differences between the two. On the similarity side they are both about information - all human emotions (all life, really:-) are exchanges of information, it’s just that the emotional is best encoded/decoded by people and is rarely sought out explicitly but in high demand implicitly (we don’t search for “happiness” and “friendship”, but we definitely search for happiness and friendship). I’d call it “explicit” vs. “implicit”.
They are both infinite in the sense that they deal with dynamic, growing entities. One could argue that F is more about flow of “new” information vs. G is more about locating existing information, but in both worlds the value (social or economic) of information decays exponentially with time.
The are both culturally challenging and both were more disruptive culturally than they were technically. The technical innovation was in both cases a fairly natural consequence of the cultural idea (the “big what” was cultural, not technical). G’s biggest contribution was simplicity and business model. In both cases the technology (“how”) needed to support the cultural “what” quickly became a technological competitive barrier. Both stumbled into spaces where single, uniform solutions are probably socially advantageous (G is “infrastructure” and F is “public architecture”). That means that both are destined for significant levels of public scrutiny and ultimately regulation and possible fragmentation. G is obviously already there, F is a few more privacy blow-ups away from it.
The are both culturally challenging and both were more disruptive culturally than they were technically. The technical innovation was in both cases a fairly natural consequence of the cultural idea (the “big what” was cultural, not technical). G’s biggest contribution was simplicity and business model. In both cases the technology (“how”) needed to support the cultural “what” quickly became a technological competitive barrier. Both stumbled into spaces where single, uniform solutions are probably socially advantageous (G is “infrastructure” and F is “public architecture”). That means that both are destined for significant levels of public scrutiny and ultimately regulation and possible fragmentation. G is obviously already there, F is a few more privacy blow-ups away from it.
You might be right but I think mine makes for a better chart ;)
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think these companies are wired very differently. Google's breakthrough was an algorithm, Facebook's was an insight about human nature. From that point forward I think they have viewed the world quite differently.
My starting point for the post was in wondering whether this difference in mission statement had any influence on people's decisions to work for one or the other.
Hope you keep the blog going!
I don't know if it was the mission statement per se, but I know that you are right about the underlying cultural differences. I have friends who passionately wanted to work for F (or at least be in that space) and would have nothing to do with G, largely due to the factors on your chart. I also have friends who left G somewhat disillusioned (even though that may have been a function of scale of G and all the problems that go with it).
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