Archive for December, 2010
The Digital Arms Race.
In July 2010, there were rumours of Google planning to start its own social networking site. Since Facebook has already positioned itself as “the king of social networking”, there was a high level of confusion and uncertainty as to how well it would work out, especially considering the fact that Google’s previous two attempts, Buzz and Okrut, were failures. In September, they announced that they planned to introduce social networking add-ons that would integrate with their core products such as Gmail or Youtube.
At the same time, Google had been impulsively shopping with purchases of online gaming companies, such as Jambool, Social Deck, Slide, Zyngo, and many others. But it didn’t stop there. Google also stealthily bought like.com, Angstrom, Aardvark and Jaiku. What were they planning to use all of this for?
In November, Google began to pay employees to stay with them. At one point, Google ended up paying an engineer $6 million to not go to Facebook.
It seems as if theres a cold war between the two current “internet superpowers.” It will certainly be fascinating to see how it ends, and what tricks Google has up its sleeves.