Facebook Badge

Loke San | Create Your Badge

Blog2010ray2.blogspot.com


Monday, March 11, 2013

The most important difference between Facebook and Google - Smarter Investing

The most important difference between Facebook and Google - Smarter Investing
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. RAYLOKEMarch 11, 2013 at 5:11 PM

    Unique DIFFERENCES ; The biggest organizational philosophy that works well at Facebook but doesn't work well at Google is Facebook's value of "Move fast and break things." In Zuckerberg's S-1 letter from earlier in 2012, he wrote, "The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough." [1] At Google, if you break something, the dominant cultural response would be that you didn't do enough testing.

    This translates into a few operational differences:
    •Facebook engineering can attain much higher iteration speeds than Google. Moving fast leads to Facebook mottos like "ship early and ship often" [2], which is not something that's culturally ingrained at Google.
    •Google generally ends up with higher quality code and more test coverage since more time is spent per launch and since not breaking things is important. Shipping later and less frequently also means receiving initial user feedback later and receiving less user feedback over time, so there is likely also a stronger tendency at Google to overdesign products relative to at Facebook.
    •Moving fast lets Facebook place more bets and validate more
    ... cont/-

    ReplyDelete
  2. RAYLOKEMarch 11, 2013 at 5:12 PM

    ... cont/- ... •Moving fast lets Facebook place more bets and validate more ideas with less effort per idea, which lets it more quickly hone in on the ideas that produce the highest impact. Conversely, Google is more likely to over-invest in the products and features that ultimately end up failing because it takes more effort to validate each idea.

    Facebook's only about a tenth of the size of Google in number of employees [3, 4], so time will show whether the culture of moving fast and breaking things will continue to scale as the company grows and as more things break.

    ----------

    [1] Facebook’s S-1 Letter From Zuckerberg Urges Understanding Before Investment | TechCrunch
    [2] Facebook Engineering's Notes: Ship early and ship twice as often
    [3] How many employees does Facebook have?
    [4] How many employees does Google have?

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)