[drakaal]

The premise that they missed the boat is wrong. They built a leaky boat because their core competence is in a different field. Google didn't "Miss the boat" they just never studied Nautical Science.

Google is very good at things that are mathematical, predictable, quantifiable, and numeric.

Google fails at things like Natural Language, Art, Social, Music, Video (youtube doesn't count that's just hosting and they bought it already successful, and it still doesn't hardly make any money)

Facebook would "miss the boat on search". Apple will "miss the boat" on social.

The difference is those guys won't go after a boat if they don't have the competency for it.

[swframe]

I was there at the time. It is not just that Google is good at certain things. It is also that the developers who built orkut were very very bright new developers (many just out of college) who lacked experience. The brazilians took over orkut and the developers were unable to make tough decisions; like starting fresh. They also made the friendster mistake; their first implementation couldn't scale and by the time the fixed it, it was too late. Furthermore, at the time, google had a policy of assigning managers to cover a very large number of developers and although the orkut manager was very sharp, he didn't have more than a few hours a week to provide leadership. The final issue, was that orkut had a huge usage rate and no other service (gmail, picasa, etc) would accept an integration with orkut because it meant having to handle the huge additional load. Google needed Larry to step in and tell people they had to make it work. This is a classic example of a failure of one of Google's core development philosophies: "Developers don't need management or experience; they can find the right solution using intelligence alone; you should never tell developers what to do." (full disclosure -- they kicked me out of the group so my opinion is biased; please take that into account).

[ENGNR]

Also Orkut was built on a Microsoft stack. Legitimate choice, but also seen as slightly toxic within a company like Google.

[joelrunyon]

I don't think your other examples of FB & Apple are any good.

* FB hasn't really given search a big go yet. They're working on getting onto everyone's phone. I think that's too early to call.

* Apple bought Lala & has PING. Neither were great successes.

[drakaal]

I picked those examples because both are looking at those as features not as core to their business. Google is trying to make Social a core of their business.

Facebook is building a search engine. They are very proud of their "natural language" graph search. If they expand that to web sites they will likely fail.

Apple is starting to look at social with things like Facetime. But they are looking at it as a feature not a core business.

[bentcorner]

> FB hasn't really given search a big go yet.

I'd be interested to see them try, because I have no idea what they could offer that I don't already get from the plethora of search engines available. I think Bing already has some social search thing that pushes up searches done by friends or something, but I don't hear much about that at all.

[waterlesscloud]

Facebook doesn't just have the social graph of who your friends are and what they search for.

They also have an increasingly insightful record of your personality. Probably moreso than Google, since Facebook gets more of your "casual" life than Google.

Google is in a good position to record and analyze the intents you express, but Facebook likely has a better record of who you are outside of those expressed intents.

Turning that into a useful product is difficult, but I'd be very surprised if they never work in that direction.

[human_error]

I think Apple was just testing the waters with Ping; more like a social experiment for Apple. I don't think they actually cared much.