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Comment by eliben | Hacker News Reader

  "Just three companies—Google, Apple, and Facebook
   —generated most of the new ideas (at least the
   mainstream ones) and most of the business momentum.
  (If I had more room and time, I’d work Amazon into
  the argument, but as a technology company, it ranks
  well behind the other three.) "

I find this puzzling. What great new ideas have emerged from Facebook, exactly? It's just one of multiple very similar social networks that prevailed through better execution and marketing.

On the other hand, Amazon has built amazing cloud services - which is impressive, considering that it started as an online book shop. And placing Facebook in the same sentence with Google when mentioning innovation is nothing short of ludicrous.

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Agreed. It's really hard to read the rest of the article without questioning every statement after reading that ridiculous paragraph early on. You're telling me Facebook, who's killer app was photo tagging for the first 3 years of its existence and who has, over the last few years, been struggling with transitioning its platform to a mobile audience, somehow ranks ahead, technology-wise, of the biggest e-commerce site on the internet? The technology that goes into Amazon's logistics and distribution platform alone rivals facebook's impressive scale, and Amazon is doing that while, at the same time powering a gigantic and feature rich cloud service and methodically eating the publishing industry's lunch.

It's because he's not measuring greatness by technical achievement, he's measuring greatness by how much you have changed the average consumer's behavior. Amazon's big as far as e-commerce goes...but people bought things before, they can buy things from other websites, and they'll continue to buy things even if Amazon didn't exist. Facebook somehow managed to get people to spend 2-3 hours/day throwing sheep at each other and give up all their personal information for targeted ads.

Zuckerburg's genius isn't that he's a master technologist (I hear he's pretty good, but that was never FaceBook's core competency), it was that he realized social networking would be a billion dollar business long before anyone else did. Google had competitors out within a year, but it never took those competitors seriously, and so 9 years on they are still struggling to play catch-up.

Probably nearly everyone on Hacker News could've built FaceBook in a weekend or so, in its original incarnation. Zuck was the only one who realized he should and then pressed forward with it, and that's why he got rich.

Building Facebook is one thing, scaling Facebook is an entirely different beast.

Agreed, but I find scaling Amazon's physical and digital infrastructures in tandem is equally impressive.

I agree with you that Zuck deserves praise for taking the idea of Social networking and running with it far longer and more successfully than anyone else. But, I can just as easily make the argument that people were using the Internet to interact socially before, they can interact socially on other websites, and they will continue to interact socially online even if Facebook didn't exist (we could be spending 2-3 hours a day on myspace or instagram right now). All of these companies (except for maybe Apple, who introduced a completely new paradigm with the consumer PC back in the 80's) took something consumers were already doing and did it better. Therefore, I think the argument has to be made from a technological perspective, where Amazon is the clear innovator.

Google is just one of multiple similar search products that prevailed through better execution and marketing.

This is a deep fallacy. The amount of science and technology behind Google's prevalence is absolutely huge. Google prevailed through better search results, not through execution and marketing.

As someone who remembers just how dreadful search results were before google, I concur wholeheartedly. All the brilliant execution in the universe won't do you any good at all if no one wants to visit your site because your search results suck. Google was able to dominate because their far superior search results gave them lots of users to sell to advertisers.

Right and Facebook prevailed through being a technology company and having amazing engineers to make the technology scale. They just turned on their first data center outside of the USA (in Sweden). That datacenter is comprised of technology developed 100% by Facebook and it's 100% open sourced (including hardware). That's the power and innovation of a true technology company.

Myspace was never ever a technology company and neither were many of the competing social networks like Friendster. Facebook just built a better product. Just like Google did.

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