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Comment by kevando | Hacker News Reader

Unlike those other companies, Facebook has a clear vision: Connect the world. If you listen to Mark Zuckerberg talk about that vision, you see that facebook.com is just a part of the over arching goal. It's really cool to see such conviction.

Rather: Google, Amazon, Microsoft - those companies just print money and have the luxury to think 10 steps ahead. Granted some of the most brilliant minds work for them, so their view of 10 steps ahead is often spot on and extremely innovative (gmail, aws, IE).

jk jk on IE. Honestly, I am not sure what Microsoft has done lately..

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Google's (official) mission "is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" (https://www.google.com/about/company/). Microsoft's is "to create a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most." (http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/shareholder-l...).

How's Facebook different having a mission statement?

It's different in the sense their decisions that lead to becoming a'conglomerate' adhere to their mission. 3bn for Nest doesn't really help organize the world's data.

Unless you view Nest as the source of data (which many believe it is)

I guess he means in that Facebook focuses on that, and Google and MS do all kinds of incompatible shit.

> How's Facebook different having a mission statement?

Every public intervention from Mark, every decision (admittedly from my undocumented point of view) is explicitly tied to that decision. I can’t remember when any of the Google triumvirate justified anything, ads or docs with their mission statement. Even negative decisions: Facebook justified not making cellphone hardware with their statement, because an OS would be more sensical -- a convoluted distinction to most, and one they might as well regret and tip-toe around when they start building antennas in Africa, but… no one would fail to see on that is directly in line with Zuckerberg’s initial idealism of “ending the conflict between Isreal and Palestinians by making them shares their stories”.

No one is saying they are markedly different from the inside, but Google founders, especially with Glass, comes off as Borg operators with “God vision” (cf. the first description of a screen showing live queries on a global map on Wired, 15 years ago); Mark is still that (annoying) teenager just out of the Peace Corps who own nothing, and wants everyone to get alone.

> jk jk on IE. Honestly, I am not sure what Microsoft has done lately..

.Net/C# is pretty dominant on the east coast. I see far more .Net shops than Java anyway. This leads me to believe that server licensing and Azure might be even bigger profit centers in the future. It is not consumer driven, but finance, insurance, HR, accounting, etc. are serious markets with deep pockets. .Net displaced many systems that were 40+ years old (COBOL, RPG/AS400, etc.), so I am doubtful that there are many contenders that could swoop in and steal the market anytime soon.

>Facebook has a clear vision: Connect the world

to Facebook platform.

They tried making that platform more open, hired coders close to the Open Social Web to develop tools to allow you to export all your information, etc. They hit a lot of snag: negative opinion like yours challenging their sincerity, lack of significant adoption, more general ethical dilemmas on having your interactions recorded by a third-party media: who ‘owns’ what (owning being a terrible metaphor for right to access, right to erase and the absence of sensical editing).

I agree their importance and idealism should have put their goal much higher, but I believe (as in: that’s my PhD conclusion) that they are going for the most successful and fastest approach of connecting as many people as humanly possible first on a coherent platform, and will open it once the impact and feasibility of that is the greatest.

Age of Empires was pretty good.

PRETTY good? One time on multi-player I was decimated to a single peon and buried my way into a nook in the forest and rebuilt a mighty army and was ultimately defeated. Damnit, I was depressed after that one..

The Black Forest survivalist strategy. Also good was carving a back entrance into your enemies base.

goddamn siege onagers...

I used to build long palisades of wood; the AI would do some path-finding, and discover the gap in the fence around the back of my base. It would then send a steady stream of units to attack me, but they'd walk in single file along the wall towards the gap...

"Connect the world" isn't exactly a clear goal.

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