Google Is Losing Face

Big, successful tech companies could once count on a fairly long reign. But as the recent defections from Google to Facebook show, the cycle of creation and destruction grows ever shorter.

As the New York Times reports today, Google is working harder than ever to hold onto top engineering talent—and often loses the battle. It tells the tale of Josh McFarland and Mark Ayzenshtat, who "both left Google to found TellApart, which helps retailers advertise online."

Now Google isn't about to fade from the universe. It has a market cap of $186 billion—more than four times what Facebook reportedly is worth in the private market. But valuations can shift suddenly and dramatically, and Facebook is clearly the ascendant party.

It just goes to show that the time in the spotlight is getting shorter. IBM had its day—make that quite a few decades. It dominated the tech world from the middle of the last century until Microsoft came along. And Microsoft had a few decades of wild success before it had to seriously worry about the likes of Apple or Google.

What is to blame? It may be technology itself, thanks to constantly falling prices and the sector's affinity to lower the entry barriers endured by new companies. Add to this the rise of cloud computing, which reduces the need for many tech companies to invest in much infrastructure at all.

Google, which has been around for about a dozen years, never had that luxury. And it's a good bet that Facebook won't either.

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