Former Facebook employee Antonio Garcia Martinez is coming up with a new book titled “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley”. In his upcoming book, he reveals how the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had apparently declared a lockdown and even vowed to destroy Google Plus back in the year 2011. Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook’s earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical, Martinez explained in his book. Fearing that Google would take over social media with the power of its search, Zuckerberg declared a Lockdown.
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The author mentions that the launch of Google Plus in June 2011 had hit Facebook like a bomb. an excerpt published by Vanity Fair read, Zuck took it as an existential threat comparable to the Soviets’ placing nukes in Cuba in 1962. It was clear, with the launch of Google Plus, that the search giant had Facebook in its crosshairs. Martinez observes in his book that Google Plus was pretty good, in some ways better than Facebook. Given you had a Google Plus sign-up button practically everywhere in your Google user experience, the possibility of its network growing exponentially was very real indeed.
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Martinez mentions that when Facebook had just begun spreading its wings, Google had been famously dismissive of it.” This was probably because Google’s search monopoly had made it feel insurmountable. However, when Google had to face talent drain with its employees moving to Facebook Google got nervous. Google instituted a policy whereby any desirable Googler who got a Facebook offer would have it beaten instantly by a heaping Google counter-offer, wrote Martinez. Even this policy did not stop people from moving to Facebook.
News source: Times of India