There are some posts going around on a recent conversation had between Fred Wilson and John Doerr where they debate how innovative Google and Facebook are.
Fred takes the point that Facebook and Google aren’t really innovating anymore, instead they are buying small companies and scaling their innovation. John disagrees, although supposedly was hard pressed to come up with concrete examples.
My opinion:
Scaling is innovation.
Just because we, as consumers, aren’t seeing the innovation doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The plumbing required to support the search volume on Google and the traffic volume on Facebook is amazing. And the growth both companies have experienced over the past 5 years is unprecedented. The engineers and sys admins at these two companies are experiencing problems + creating solutions no other company in the history of the internet has had to experience (OK, Twitter is probably getting some of this too).
A better question would be are either of these companies producing business model innovations. Since Google seems to like to give a lot of stuff away for free to get ad revenue, and I’m not really sure how Facebook will make $ other than advertising, I think this may be the bigger issue these two were actually debating.
