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Comment by DuncanIdaho | Hacker News Reader

The game is on! Please place your bets!

So now we see who is the real powerhouse and if the Facebook is the Google killer hype lives up to its expectations.

I place my bet on Google, I also see in my crystal ball that Zuckenberg is going to do something so stupid and greedy that he will shadow Rupert Murdoch. And I also divine that this will happen in next 5 years. By 2016 you will see headlines: Facebook is dead, Larry Page reads obituary. Stock options worthless.

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> I place my bet on Google, I also see in my crystal ball that Zuckenberg is going to do something so stupid and greedy that he will shadow Rupert Murdoch.

While I don't think fb will die soon, of the two companies I'd say Google has the far higher staying power (and is more ethical)

Google has the far higher staying power

Make no mistake, Google is scared stupid. They know their core business is in the crosshairs of both Facebook and Apple. They won't go down without a fight, but that Google is reaching out in every possible direction clearly shows that they know they need to move fast to avoid the situation Microsoft is now in (irrelevancy).

apple has search and mass market ads in their crosshairs...?

Apple definitely wants a piece of the mobile advertising market otherwise they wouldn't have created the iAd network. And I speculate Apple will drop Google from the Safari search box at some point and replace it with a custom location & context aware "mobile search" engine.

Hardly. Google can lose this battle without dying. Facebook can't.

Two determined opponents are about to do battle... both are composed of very smart and motivated people. One side gets slaughtered if they lose, the other side just has to walk back home and continue to enjoy their current lifestyle. Are you sure you're betting on the right side?

That's the old argument: Rabbits are faster than foxes because rabbits are running for their lives, while foxes are only running for their dinner. For the sake of an interesting discussion, I would like to point out a flaw in applying this logic to FB vs. Google.

The dinner/life argument is true when we observe creatures that have co-evolved over a long period of time to reach an equilibrium of sorts in an ecological niche. Foxes catch some rabbits, but not enough to wipe them out, and not so few that foxes starve.

However, along the way there may have been other predators that starved to death because they couldn't catch any rabbits. And other prey animals that couldn't run fast enough and were wiped out. If we travel to a new ecological niche like a volcanic island that has risen from the sea, and there we observe one fox chasing a rabbit, it isn't a safe bet that the rabbit will escape the fox. We don't have evidence that foxes and rabbits are in equilibrium on that island, with both species able to eat enough and live long enough to reliably produce offspring.

Looking at Facebook and Google, we are not talking about the business equivalent of evolutionary time, and we are not talking about whole classes of businesses. Even though Facebook is running for its life, Google can easily wipe them out, just as on our volcanic island, one fox might easily eat one or for that matter all rabbits.

Footnote for the curious: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ilha_da_Queim...

That's a poor analogy - in rabbits versus foxes, I would place my bet on the rabbits. Historically rabbits have been real pests for places where uncontrolled growth occurred, as foxes don't hunt rabbits when having lower hanging fruits in the area :-)

Facebook is more like a wolverine than a docile rabbit. Google is a bear; much bigger and should be more capable, but the wolverine is 10x more violent and will easily back it down in a fight over the salmon. The wolverine is quick, fearless and single-minded ( "eat!" ) while the bear is large, slow, probably well fed, and therefore isn't nearly as tenacious. With that analogy, who you should bet on is clear.

I think there are a few surprise around the corner, is my tip.

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/36191-lookingconfident/139...

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/36191-lookingconfident/141...

You don't think there's room for two entirely different kinds of businesses on the internet?

Amazon must be shaking in their boots because of all these hot up and coming flash gaming sites.

No, they're just collecting rent from them on ec2.

> Zuckenberg (sic) is going to do something so stupid and greedy that he will shadow Rupert Murdoch.... By 2016 you will see headlines: Facebook is dead

To my knowledge, Rupert Murdoch is still obscenely rich and widely considered to be enormously successful.

Facebook has to stay cool, which is very difficult. It also doesn't have a clear way to dominate Google's bread-and-butter business, organic search and paid search advertising. They are no doubt very innovative but I give Google the edge, especially if Google can figure out social.

I'm placing my money on company X, you know, that company that's barely a twinkle in anybody's eye but will grow up to dominate the web 3.0 landscape.

In 5 years, I'll bet you'll see Facebook and Google teaming up against X, how crazy a prediction is that?

You should place your bet on http://www.longbets.org/

I'm someone who thinks that Facebook still has massive scale and hype on its side, but will struggle to deliver on the potential it has. But, I don't agree with the 'X is dead' contention - the media and start-up community seems to have embraced it wholeheartedly.

It is perfectly possible to have a world in which both Google and Facebook exists and exist as giants.

It is perfectly possible to have a world in which Facebook loses a lot of its current sheen, but still rakes in a handsome profit. Google will continue to be brilliantly profitable, but the blowout quarters will be harder to come by.

Most market segments are large enough to support, 1,2 or 3 profitable leaders. Even in a segment as niche as commercial aircrafts, you have multiple players. The entire contention of one killer market leader is the greatest eyewash of our times.

I place my bet on Google as well.

One a sidenote, I think it's ludicrous to even suggest Facebook is a Google killer. It's a social network. That's all it is. Unless you have people that you interact with on it, it's pretty useless. My 2 cents.

Facebook is going to destroy Google. Google is fighting too many battles; Facebook with the left hand, Apple with the right, Microsoft with its left leg.

Facebook only has one enemy, besides the Federal Government.

It's left hand probably has more employees than facebook.

What makes you think more employees has anything to do with the point I'm making? Microsoft has ~3 times as many employees as Google. That doesn't mean they can wipe Google out.

It also makes it unlikely that Google can wipe them out. They have a war chest and can come up with failing product after failing product for centuries and still not be in trouble. And every once in a while, if you throw shit at the wall, it sticks.

(See: XBox.)

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