During a recent interview with PBS broadcast journalist Charlie Rose, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed various topics, including competition with Google. More specifically, here’s how Zuckerberg referred to the search giant’s Google+ product:
Charlie Rose: But you’re already getting in each other’s business. You know that. They have something called Google+.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, and no. I mean, I think, you know, Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook.
As you can see in the Bloomberg interview embedded above, at the sixth minute Google+ Vice President of Product Management Bradley Horowitz hits back:
Emily Chang: Now Mark Zuckerberg just said, we just heard him say that Google is creating it’s own little version of Facebook. Is that how you guys think about this?
Bradley Horowitz: We are delighted to be underestimated. It’s served us very well to date. That’s fine by us. I’m not going to clear anything up.
Horowitz is playing this game very well, because that’s really what this is: a game of words. I believe Zuckerberg simply took the opportunity to throw a punch at Google+ – he actually takes Google’s initiative very seriously given how deep the search giant’s pockets are.
After all, when Facebook first learned of the Google+ project in the summer 2010 (at the time known only as codename Emerald Sea), the social networking giant went into lockdown and started quickly pumping out new products and new features. It’s exactly why I maintain Google+ is the best thing that ever happened to Facebook.
See also:
- Facebook is destroying Google in time spent online (chart)
- Google: Facebook is becoming “a closed walled garden”
- Google starts indexing Facebook comments, AJAX/JavaScript content
- Sean Parker: Facebook’s power users have gone to Twitter, Google+
- Facebook is not 20 times the size of Google+; it’s even bigger
