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Comment by codeup | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but it's interesting that Google is doing so much more than just search today and they're not inviting the same response. Is it because the main search service has stayed the same without suffering from feature bloat?

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Google never tried to change its core product the way Facebook has. Facebook started as a private network of close friends and they've changed it to an open network of friends, family, and the world. As much as they've changed about the product, they cannot change users' perceptions, which have remained the same throughout. They've basically caused their users to suffer from cognitive dissonance about what Facebook is vs. what they expect it to be.

Google makes separate products. They're well integrated, but you can use gmail without ever seeing maps, and vice-versa.

Facebook on the other hand is monolithic, and that gives it a much greater appearance of omnipresent intrusiveness.

I wonder if this is true of each company's management style too - I don't know anyone in Google or Facebook personally but it does seem to me that Google values engineer autonomy more than any other company (and that is one reason for its huge success, trusting its engineers).

Because you can still do just plain search.

Google makes lots of products that you can use however you please. Facebook makes one product, and when you want to use one aspect of it, you get lots of baggage that you don't necessarily care about.

Its an interesting comparison, but I think at least part of the difference lies in the fact many of google's main services -- search, maps, shopping, news -- are about getting you what you want and away from google. The faster you're done using google, the less time you spend there, the better they're doing. Gmail and apps are more time consuming but I think a certain level of "well, I have no choice to do the this work or not, I might as well have a nice interface" comes into play when using those.

Google's tools seem more about facilitating accomplishing something else as fast as possible, while facebook is the ends in and of itself. How long you spend on facebook is the metric of how well facebook is doing.

At least thats my take on it.

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