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Comment by lordmax | Hacker News Reader

> Also, Google employees lobbied for a social networking product to Larry & Sergey in 2003 and the result was Orkut.

i think its good example of not "good enough" formalization. Afaik Orkut had a lot of operational freedom to do what he wanted with Orkut. it just nobody (the whole pool being semi-dead friendster at that point) had the answers what is actually important to build a socnet. Today we have 20/20 hindsight its absolutely terrible to have runaway adoption in 3rd world country that doesn't speak english... yet thats one of the axioms we learned "the hard way". And obviously that increased formalization (whats working, whats not) was helping Mark a lot when doing next iteration.

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The premise of your article is that startups live beyond the areas where existing enterprises have applicable knowledge - That is an equalizer. But as you say, they still have to search and try very hard, they prevail because they try harder (and get lucky eventually) not because they are the only ones with the good sense to try.

What I'm trying to say is that Orkut was less passonate about it and had his creativity and motivation stifled compared to Mark.

Mark obsessed over his project and had everything to gain. Orkut on the other hand - What advantage was there for him in building his project from within Google? None. And not much to gain, just a promotion.

If he really had his heart in it why not go it alone? He didn't, so he did not.

>What I'm trying to say is that Orkut was less passonate about it and had his creativity and motivation stifled compared to Mark. Mark obsessed over his project and had everything to gain. Orkut on the other hand - What advantage was there for him in building his project from within Google? None. And not much to gain, just a promotion.

You can be very much obsessed even in building something within Google. Obsession and passion are not measured in money.

By your logic the creators of Unix weren't obsessed with it, because "what did they have to gain (from AT&T)? Just a promotion".

I'd say being passionate in the specific thing we're discussing (Facebook vs Orkut) doesn't mean a thing. What exactly that more advanced Mark HAD to show for his passion? Yes, he has the far far better business now, but where was the passion factor at play in making a better offering THEN?

What I see is business opportunities and mistakes in Orkut vs Facebook.

Not any engineering (or other) passion that resulted in a visibly better product.

i think largely along the same lines. Orkut done tremendous job with what he had at the time. The only (highly dubious) claim we can make why Orkut did not succeed right away its because it was treated as side-project by Google, rather then throwing 100s of people on it right away to develop it better, and to compensate for early mistakes like Brazil stealing early audience and pushing local users away from the community.

Yet thats kinda the key point of the essay: the act of knowing how big/important social networking is requires somebody first to formalize that knowledge. imho Google was very good corporate host to let Orkut experiment so much as he did. It just wasn't enough.

> By your logic the creators of Unix weren't obsessed with it, because "what did they have to gain (from AT&T)? Just a promotion".

Not so, Bell labs was a special place at the time and provided significant advantages (like access to computers for one). If the likes of Thompson and Ritchie came about 15 years later where they could develop Unix independently and the aforementioned advantages had melted away, why wouldn't they? At that point AT&T would offer nothing but constraints.

>Not so, Bell labs was a special place at the time and provided significant advantages (like access to computers for one). If the likes of Thompson and Ritchie came about 15 years later where they could develop Unix independently and the aforementioned advantages had melted away, why wouldn't they? At that point AT&T would offer nothing but constraints.

I call BS. People also do stuff for the mere fun of it, especially geeks.

For example Thompson and Ritchie had no problem developing Plan 9 for Lucent (AT & T) "15 years later" after the "advantages had melted away".

Not to mention that the example of advantage you provide ("access to computers for one") is insignificant in any case. Thompson and Ritchie could get work anywhere they wanted with computers available. At least the other commenter meant huge deals of money by "advantage", not standard job perks.

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