New Delhi: Facebook today is the biggest and most successful social network worldwide. Things, however, were not the same back in 2011, when the fate of Facebook was unpredictable. There were too many rivals - the biggest among them being Google. The troubles that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg must have gone through are understandable but that he would set out on a mission to destroy Google’s social network Google Plus following its launch was not known, until now.
Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook employee, has now come up with these revelations in his upcoming book called “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley”. In this book, Martinez provides deep insights and the inside scoop of Facebook empire.
He said the moment GooglePlus was launched, Zuckerberg couldn’t think of anything but to destroy it, and that too to such extent that the social network went into a lockdown state.
“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.
He also wrote that Google hadn’t paid any importance to Facebook during its initial days. However, when the search-giant witnessed that his employees were moving to Facebook, "Google got nervous".
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Google came out with a policy for its employees. “Google instituted a policy whereby any desirable Googler who got a Facebook offer would have it beaten instantly by a heaping Google counter-offer.”
Google wanted to counter Facebook with the launch of Google Plus and Martinez writes that it “was pretty good, in some ways better than Facebook.”
This made Zuckerberg nervous and he declared a ‘lockdown’, from where the destruction started. Zuckerberg delivered his first ‘lockdown speech’ on the day Google Plus was launched. In the book, Martinez quoted “You know, one of my favorite Roman orators ended every speech with the phrase Carthago delenda est. ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ For some reason I think of that now,”
For Zuckerberg, Carthage meant Google Plus, which was its mission to destroy.
