Why you should look at Google and not Facebook as a model to stay ahead

By Vivek Wadhwa

I expect that within a few years, my Tesla electric car will drive by itself using Google software. Yes, I am talking about the selfdriving, autonomous vehicles that we saw in science fiction movies. Google is making these a reality. Its autonomous cars have already driven half a million miles on California roads—without a single accident. These will soon transform transportation in cities all over the world. (I’m not so sure about India however, only God can tame its drivers).

Thanks to Google Fiber, my house may one day have 1000 Gigabit Internet. Google’s Wi-Fi balloons, called Google Loon, could provide me with connectivity when I go hiking in the mountains. I expect that a successor to Google Glass will replace my laptop, iPad, and TV, incorporate voice recognition and gestures, and provide me with an immersive 3D viewing experience.

Google already reads my emails before I do and knows what I am thinking by analyzing what I search for on the Internet and which Web sites I visit. It “knows” what other people think about me. If my friend and noted futurist Ray Kurzweil succeeds in his mission at Google, it will also understand my wants and needs. It will predict what I want to search for, where I want to go, and what I want to eat. It will understand how my brain thinks and become my personal assistant.

Goodwill Hunting

Yes, these technologies that Google will likely deliver during this decade. It is doing the type of research that Xerox PARC was famous for. It is thinking even bigger than Apple. What do I expect from Facebook?

More ads, more annoying sponsored posts, more intrusions of privacy. Maybe Facebook will continue to jazz up its Timeline and improve its search capabilities. It will, for sure, buy or copy more hot products such as Instagram, Pintrest, and Foursquare. But it won’t develop any earth shattering technologies because it doesn’t do Google-style “moonshots”—it just doesn’t have the culture and DNA. It is still the social network that the kid in the dormroom built.

Now that Facebook is a public company it is under intense pressure to justify its inflated stock price. I expect it will try to squeeze more revenue out of its existing customers. No doubt, they will become more frustrated with the ads and privacy intrusions. They will eventually abandon it for private social networks or the next big thing. Facebook could go the way of AOL and Myspace.

You can also see the difference between Facebook and Google in their corporate social responsibility and how they are perceived.
When Google went public, it set aside three million shares—which are now worth close to three billion dollars—and has committed an additional 1% of its profits to philanthropic endeavors. It has been donating this money to the community and using it to engineer solutions to the global problems of health, poverty, food, and energy. A group called Google for Entrepreneurs mentors and support entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. They have been working with my team at Singularity University and Stanford to help women entrepreneurs. Google has been doing all this since its early days. It has built tremendous goodwill with developers and local communities.