Why Facebook becoming new Yahoo?

TBH I thought Facebook was innovating like hell, rebuilding itself into a communication platform instead of a social network.<p>From what I've seen working on a major news site they are destroying Google in referral traffic. Seems to me they know what they are doing, and its no accident they are in the number one place.<p>He's totally correct about them copying Google+ features, but thats just reaction to a threat, all companies do this when a competitor comes alone. Its nothing more than an attempt to undervalue.<p>He's also wrong about the noise controls on Facebook. They work well, they monitor interest to those who follow you, and if theres interest the post gets promoted. If its not getting promoted, chances are that it didn't get initial traction.<p>Plus the audiences are completely different, I don't have a single tech orientated thing on Facebook. Just music, the arts, TV shows, stuff I do to relax and have fun.<p>I don't expect to see Scoble articles on my Facebook, I expect to see them in my special curated RSS feeds which I read when I work. Maybe I'm weird not wanting to mix pleasure and work, but I kind of think it would be the norm.<p>Google+ is in a heavy nose dive, except for a few demagogue like figures, and a very tech orientated control prone to idolisation of said people. I haven't noticed an inch of innovation on it at all, so this guys entire article seems like an agenda push, rather than actual analysis or reporting. I've never followed this guy before, but he's definitely devalued my opinion of him and gone onto "talk with a grain of salt" list for that piece.<p>I guess this guy is his little attention bubble and blind to fact that Google+ is a joke to everyone else, is being lampooned very hard on other social websites. This one from Reddit had me laughing the other day <a href="http://i.imgur.com/XNkyT.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/XNkyT.png</a>

Honestly, I'm failing to see how G+ is a "creature of vision". Sure, it has a couple new and unique features - circles, chat, etc. But most of it is a direct copy of Facebook! Profile and feed are two examples where Facebook has innovated to establish itself as a strong identity provider, and G+ blatantly copied those features.<p>I'm not blaming Google for doing that. In fact, were I in their position I would be doing the exact same thing. But it's silly to claim that Facebook doesn't innovate. I'm not sure if people are just so used to ideas like the News Feed that they don't see it, but a couple years ago Facebook created that feature and it led to an explosion of social communication on their site.<p>It's also worth pointing out that Facebook's mission statement is "to make the world more open and connected". If you look at their products from that perspective, I think they start more like "Win!" and less like "Fail!"

I think the author goes wrong here: "I think we can all agree that tech companies can be slotted into the following [4] categories"<p>This opinion does not reflect reality - it seeks to take a messy multidimensional spectrum and collapse it into a nice tidy bundle that can provide a self-satisfying mental model and throw off look-at-me-I'm-so-wise sound-bites.<p>This is the failure of punditry, and this is why reading this article (and parsing out its underlying assumptions) is not worth your time.

I think Microsoft has vision, it's just more in terms of the customer via one product (Windows). Their vision is to own the market and do what is needed to get there. It does help that they have some amazing people working there. It would help more if they could trim the turf-protecting management down.