"Our goal is not to build a platform," Zuckerberg says, "It's to be across all of them." And he alludes to Google+, dismissing it as a "little version of Facebook." Shots fired!
If you missed the chin wag between public television's Charlie Rose, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg Monday evening--and are hankering to hear more on the idea of a four-way war between Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google--watch it here.
In the segment below, Rose poses to Zuckerberg the four-way battle scenario we outlined in our November cover story, The Great Tech War of 2012.
On the way there, though, Rose suggests a mere Facebook vs. Google scrum based on the wisdom of crowds versus the wisdom of friends.
"That's Google vs. Facebook, right … the wisdom of crowds vs. the wisdom of friends?" Rose asks.
"I don't think it's Google vs. Facebook," Sandberg interrupts. "I think the wisdom of crowds applies not just to Google but to a phase of the web, which was about information and about links. It was a lot of wonderful things, mostly based on anonymity and links between crowds... Ours just starts from a totally different place. So it's an evolution."
Rose pushes: "There are four platforms out here [Silicon Valley]--it's Amazon, it's Apple, it's Google, it's Facebook--and what we're going to witness over the next 10 years is a flat-out war between the four of you for the future... Do you see that?"
Zuckerberg answers: "People like to talk about war.... There are real competitions in there, but I don't think this is going to be this type of situation where there's one company that wins all this stuff." He goes on to call out Google, though: "Google, I think in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook." He goes on to talk about how Facebook is increasingly crossing boundaries with Apple, Amazon, and Google. "Our goal is not to build a platform--it's to be across all of them," he says.
Spoken like a winner.
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