Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2010. It reports Google’s roughly 10% pay rise for all employees and a rumoured new Google social network (Google+ launched in 2011); Google Buzz’s lack of success is also covered, and it closed in 2011.
If getting a job at Google was already difficult (until now it was considered the best company to work for in terms of working conditions and flexibility), many of its people are being “bought” or lured away by the working conditions at Facebook, its biggest rival. Google has announced that it will raise the salaries of all its employees by about 10% to stop its professionals from “leaking” away.
Yesterday we wrote about the ban Google had put in place to stop Facebook from downloading users from Google accounts. Today we’re told that the ban has been lifted, and there are rumours that Google is preparing a new social network, since Google Buzz hasn’t had the success it hoped for.
In my personal opinion, Facebook is starting to play dirty, and when you don’t play fair in business, sooner or later “bad practices” take their toll. However big your company is, if you open up several enemy fronts, you’re lost, and the “appeal” of Mark Zuckerberg is not exactly stirring up passions.
Facebook managed to trick Google by breaking the agreement they had made, which is very unethical behaviour between companies of that calibre. But it’s even less ethical to staff its workforce exclusively from its main rival. It wouldn’t be the first time that, because of hiring habits like these, the rival company has placed someone inside the other company to gather information, something that, if it happened, I would consider fully justified.
In the war between these two giants, it’s clear that for now Facebook is the one that least deserves to win, at least in the way it goes about achieving its goals.
I sincerely believe that this war between number ones can teach us a lot about what to do and what never to do in business, so we’ll follow this battle for leadership of the internet very closely. It will no doubt be settled sooner than we imagine.
We’ll keep you posted.
Further reading
- The war between Google and Facebook is red hot
- Using social networks at work: productivity or distraction?
Featured image: Kevin Krejci, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
