FB is already a legacy company in my opinion. It makes no products I am interested in using and gives no indication of ever doing so. I will never call them Meta and it's going to be funny when no one else does either. They haven't earned it.

Google, whatever its problems, gives some indication of keeping up with the times. Aside from undisputed leadership in AI, there are the little things: they recently overhauled their chat tooling (again) and (finally) added Slack-style emoji reactions. If they still had some of their mid-2000s mojo, it would be neat to see them try again with a social network product.

The metaverse bet you shrug off but adding emoji reactions impresses you? Google is in “accumulate capital to deploy the next technological shift” mode, Facebook is trying to make that shift a reality (Waymo excepted).

Google keeps a large suite of in-house built, enormously useful products alive and still manages to move them forward incrementally. FB has done nothing useful for me since I signed up in 2004. Given that, why would I care if they made a video about the incredible things they will do in the future? If I'm to believe they will deliver, shouldn't they have a track record by now?

And Google has led in AI for the past decade so I'm not sure how you got the impression that FB is doing and Google is just sitting on cash. Looks exactly opposite to me.

facebook groups and marketplace are huge. Marketplace will be the craigslist killer if they can fix their scammer problems.

Groups compete well with reddit.

As they build a 'metaverse' groups, marketplace, and walls can form the foundation

you wall is your own personal space. Your groups and the marketplace become places that you go to.

How will the "metaverse" UX improve any of those experiences?

Kinda reminds me when as a kid I was excited about windows 3d UI since it sounded cool, but quickly realized it's way less convenient.

I respect that hypothesis. They've got their bite of the market with those products.

> FB has done nothing useful for me since I signed up in 2004. Given that, why would I care if they made a video about the incredible things they will do in the future?

Have you used a few VR devices over the last decade, including the last Quest?

No. I can't imagine putting on anything that would exacerbate my neck strain. Screen, stay where you are and I'll decide what angle to look at you from.

Maybe when they scale it down to the size and heft of swimming goggles.

Google has killed about 5x more things people love than FB has created. But they still keep a lot of core products alive.

Ok, I admit you have a good point. I counted the ones I can remember:

- search (although this one barely qualifies in my opinion)

- GMail/GSuite (once provided ever increasing storage, also killed free GSuite etc etc but I'll count it, it exists and has even expanded a bit)

- YouTube

- Ads

- Android

- Chrome

Quite a portfolio actually. Says something about how much I dislike them when I had to think long and hard to admit it.

Maps and docs as well. While Facebook is the king of time wasting apps, Google is the king of useful apps. They might abuse their role a bit, but at least the products are things that helps people.

And now that I think of it GCP is still alive, for now at least.

> The metaverse bet you shrug off but adding emoji reactions impresses you?

I'm not sure the metaverse play really is anything other than continuing the same thinking that led to Facebook login required for Oculus. The idea is probably to roll out VR no differently than rolling out emoji reactions. It's what you do when you get big. 1B users * 10% using new feature = BIG NEW USER BASE and you get to report growth for years as 10% turns into 20%.

That's an interesting take. Most everyone I know find Google's chat changes utter shit, and have found alternatives. Personally, I dumped it and joined a Slack community of the one person I talked with most on it.

Besides being a complete disaster, UI-wise, it freezes up and ceases working constantly in the web UI. The remaining people I know who stay on Google's chat... I simply cannot talk to anymore. I send them email or use an alternative chat service they're on.

You might consider a different example of how you feel Google is keeping up with the times.

> You might consider a different example of how you feel Google is keeping up with the times.

Nah, it's okay that I feel differently about a feature than you and say so publicly.

Their social networking product is YouTube. It's quite successful and it beat Facebook in video.

> forward-thinking younger talent can be the crucial difference

Are engineers really the ones driving at the company? I think that has not been true in "the industry" for a decade now. Marketing, upper-management are the ones steering the ships now — engineers just row.

Maybe that's why Google has made a few dozen amazing things while FB has made basically one thing and acquired the rest. A culture that respects engineering leadership.

It's hard to think of something amazing from Google that they didn't acquire other than the search engine. Maps, YouTube, Android were all acquisitions. Most Google internal projects are future entries in the "Google graveyard". The better stuff I can think of is mostly deep technical stuff like Map Reduce built to support search. Facebook has also done fairly well with things that are pillars to support the (formerly) namesake product.

Chrome, Gmail, drive, Chromecast, duo, call screening. There are plenty of entirely home grown products that have succeeded. Discounting products which have had the vast majority of their growth and featureset built out while under Google is also a but dismissive of it's role in making them successful.

duo has been successful?

GMail, various chat things, GSuite, Google Brain, Google Translate. Maps, Android, and YouTube were all massively developed and scaled after the initial acquisition.

Most of their post-2000 successful products stem from acquisitions: Docs, Maps, Waymo...

Docs was an acquisition? From where?

Started out as a product called Writely in the mid-2000s. Got bought by Google not long afterwards.

Not sure if it’s still the case but until fairly recently you could still see writely in the different domains Docs cycles through when logging in.

Version 1 was from a company named Writely. Google massively refactored and rewrote it afterwards though.

Writely. Company was called Upstartle.

i dont think a tech company will move away from a engineer centric focus, everyone which dared disappeared. Oracle as patent company is a different story

At a certain size, big tech develops efficient systems to transmute forward-thinking younger talent into slightly jaded mid career pros excited for 1% improvements and 30s off the build. The world needs both types of people and companies need them both in different measures at different points in their trajectories.

>forward-thinking younger talent can be the crucial difference between a trendy company like Facebook and a corporate monolith like Oracle.

Oracle is still one of the most profitable companies on earth. I highly doubt they care about being trendy.

Oracle is doing just fine. And if I had to trade places with Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Ellison, well, I’d say it’s not even close, but that implies there’s a metric at all.

Which would you choose?

If I had to trade places with one of those two, I’d pick Ellison. I didn’t even bother to look up their (theoretical) net worths, because at that scale it no longer makes a difference; what does make a difference to me is Ellison’s face isn’t regularly in the news attached both to stories about how they engage in censorship by removing people who break the site rules, and to other stories about how they take sides by failing to remove politicians who violate the site rules.

Well, I guess you would do a humanity a favour replacing Zuckerberg. In Ellisons shoes you can like, make Java hip again?

Not sure about that. I think management and culture would be the deciding factor. In fact our age demands diversity in the workplace and age is one of those dimentions.

"Demands diversity", really? You think people won't use FB's products as much if they don't hire enough older people?

Right now, “diversity” refers to skin color and occasionally gender

Is this actually true? I'm not sure what younger means but pretty much every anecdote of innovation i know is mostly late 20s early 30s engineers with a few YOE and a couple exceptions of whizzkids straight out of college (e.g Facebook). Genuinely quite interested if there is evidence round age and innovation in Tech.