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Comment by dannyr | Hacker News Reader

Have you observed what is happening to the mobile space?

Apple & Google are competing and they are trying to outdo each other. What resulted is more advanced phones and cheaper prices. Consumers win.

Can you imagine if nobody challenges Facebook? Did you know that what Facebook released recently (better Photos, messages, etc) is a preemptive response to Google+?

We have seen time and time again that monopolies are bad. Internet Explorer did not innovate for some time when it was in 80+ of computers. Microsoft started paying attention to IE again when Firefox and Chrome came out.

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Do you really think Facebook would stop innovating if it weren't for the threat of Google behind its back? Perhaps the timing is influenced by G+, but the actual introduction of those products are just evolutionary steps in Facebook's mission to make the world more connected.

It hires so many people (including hundreds of interns) because it wants to build a platform and a tool for people to use to keep in touch with each other. I don't think Facebook is playing from the same opening book as Microsoft.

IE is a different story because it is not a core product of Microsoft. Facebook is the core of Facebook (obviously), so it cannot just let the product atrophy like MS let IE.

Facebook might not stop innovating, but the pace of innovation will be slower. Competition fosters innovation. This is really simple business.

I never said Facebook would stop innovating but it wouldn't be as fast. Facebook is stepping up it's game.

Same can be said with Apple. IPhone would keep improving with or without Android. But I feel like Apple is being more agressive about it with Android around.

Besides, how would Apple know how to make a notification system without Android?

What has Facebook done that can be described as 'innovative' since the wall? Their only 2 decent products since then have been Connect and Like, neither of which were innovative (though they were good enough implementations to reach ubiquity). And they've released many products that are just down-right poor; Places is me-too and no one uses it, Messaging is just a mess, Groups is buried and unuseable... Facebook is riding off the network effect. It makes me wonder what exactly is going on there, as they have some of the best engineers in the world; why are they not putting out stellar product after stellar product? They've taken care of scaling already; what are these geniuses doing?

Photos. With good tagging. And now facial recognition.

When were these things implemented?

Weren't Facebook engineers behind the Cassandra project and HipHop?

Oh, and they have a list of projects their devs contribute to here: https://developers.facebook.com/opensource/

Even though their open source contributions are nice, they are still just an implementation detail that can't really be counted as product innovation.

I think you are confusing the wall with the news feed. The original wall was a single wiki on your profile (ca 2004?), later replaced with public messages on your profile. The news feed is the updates you see when you login.

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