For Google, Social Networking Is Just One Chapter of the Book

With its valuations and the number of users going through the roof, Facebook is perceived by many as the company that might dethrone Google as the next Internet superpower. Google, however, doesn’t see Facebook as a direct threat, since social networking is just one part of Google’s overall strategy.
“The digital world is exploding and it has so many chapters — it has cloud computing, it has mobile, it does have social, it has searches, it has so many elements. (…) Yes, absolutely it will be part of our strategy, yes it will be embedded in many of our products. But at the same time remember it’s one chapter of an entire book”, said Google’s Chief financial officer Patrick Pichette to Australian public television on Sunday.
While that may be true, with Facebook’s recent foray into e-mail it’s getting obvious that Facebook is competing with Google on many fronts, not merely as a social network. The real question here is whether Facebook’s core product – social networking – is more powerful a foundation than Google’s core product – search.
Pichette also weighed in on the state of mobile and Google’s great success with Android. “Now that everybody has a smartphone everybody searches, so these few hundred engineers (who developed Android) have accelerated (a market that) would have taken 10 years to develop into a few years,” he said. Pichette also repeated Eric Schmidt’s claim that 200,000 new android handsets are being activated every day.
Finally, Pichette gave his thoughts on what drives Google as a company, delivering another quote that goes hand in hand with Google’s long-standing “don’t be evil” mantra. “The first driving principle of Google is in fact not money — the first driving principle of Google is understanding that the Internet is changing the world,” he said.
courtesy: http://mashable.com/2010/11/21/google-social-media-chapter/