How Facebook Handled The Threat Of Google+
What we can learn from when Facebook encountered a direct threat: Google+.
“Here is a key insight for any startup: You may think yourself a puny midget among giants when you stride out into a marketplace, and suddenly confront such a giant via direct competition. But the reality is that larger companies often have much more to fear from you than you from them. For starters, their will to fight is less than yours. Their employees are mercenaries who don’t deeply care and suffer from the diffuse responsibility and weak emotional investment of a larger organization. What’s an existential struggle to you is merely one more set of tasks to a tuned-out engineer bored of his own product.”
- Antonio Garcia Martinez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.
In the following excerpt from Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software, coming out July 6, I discuss the events that unfolded when Facebook identified Google+ as its competitor. Subscribe to this newsletter for daily advance content from the book.
Facebook’s pivot to mobile was a response to an industry-wide shift in consumer preferences.
When consumers started using mobile devices, the smartphone was not directly competing with Facebook. Facebook was not so much concerned about a competitor as it was worried that users would simply stop using their product. The company’s worries about mobile throughout 2011 were mostly introspective rather than external.
In June 2011, Facebook encountered a directly offensive threat: Google+.
Google+ was a social network that Google built with a design very similar to Facebook’s. It had a newsfeed, a chat system, and groups. Back in 2011, many people throughout the world had not yet adopted social networking. A user picking their first social network might easily pick Google+.
As Google+ launched, every other Google product was slowly integrated with its social features.
Google Search results displayed a “+1” button that allowed you to socially endorse them to your friends. Gmail encouraged you to follow your family members after you sent them an email, which made it clear that Google was making a strong push to become a social networking company.
Google+ was a blatant clone that Google was pushing out through its existing distribution channels. Facebook engineers were disgusted. One of those engineers was Keith Adams.
Keith Adams is an infrastructure engineer with a quiet, academic demeanor. After joining Facebook in 2009, Keith eventually became a legend as the creator of HHVM, a system for running PHP code more effectively. Under-stated, peaceful, and humble, he is the kind of engineer of whom you would never feel scared. But when reminded of Google+, even a pacifist like Keith narrows his eyes and becomes energized with a competitive spirit.
Keith describes the rivalrous history that led to the creation of Google+. “There was a drumbeat building inside of Google to destroy Facebook. It wasn’t just an effort to get into social networking. They were focused on us. Google wanted to destroy us.”
In the world of software warfare, there are not many rules of engagement. The corporate battle between Google and Facebook had gotten dirty. Google was aggressively scraping the Facebook social graph, mapping out how Facebook worked and what made it successful. Around this time, Google gave its engineers a 10 percent raise across the board. Facebook followed suit a few weeks later.
“I remember it feeling really scary,” says Keith. “Google was enormously larger, enormously more resourced, and willing to do anything to defeat us, including building a straight-up Facebook clone. That’s what was alarming. This was a Facebook clone, except it was built by Google engineers. Google engineers are intimidating. They are ten feet tall. They eat razor blades for breakfast. How could we compete?"
Engineers who were at Facebook during the early days of Google+ remember the fervent enthusiasm. The company was ready to defend its territory, and everyone had bought into the mission. Facebook’s execution on products became as honed as a dagger, as the company improved its mobile platform and figured out its business model.
Users never fell in love with Google+. Despite the Google product experience becoming saturated with features that directed the user towards Google+, it never seemed to have the satisfying stickiness of the Facebook product.
Although Facebook was temporarily fixated on beating Google, the company never lost sight of its main purpose: building new products, designing new experiences, and growing user engagement.
While you are waiting for Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software, learn more about how modern data infrastructure works on our YouTube channel.