Google and Facebook have ceased to innovate, according to venture capitalist Fred Wilson, an allegation that John Doerr, a rival VC and Google board member, found hard to refute at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
Mr Wilson (pictured right, photo courtesy of Web 2.0 Summit), author of the popular A VC blog and a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, said Google had not come up with anything truly transformative that was a home-grown product since Gmail, introduced in 2004. It had relied on acquisitions instead to develop new services.
“I don’t think that’s true, I think there’re all kinds of really innovative and essential services that come out of Google,” said Mr Doerr (pictured left), a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, in response.
Asked to name one, he came up with Google Docs, seemingly unaware that Docs was created out of the acquisitions of Upstartle’s Writely product and 2Web Technologies’ XL2Web.
Mr Doerr gave Google Voice as another example, before being corrected that this came out of the acquisition and rebadging of GrandCentral.
Mr Wilson went on to question Facebook’s level of innovation:
“What has Facebook invented recently – not the status update, not the check-in..they’ve just copied this,” he said.
Mr Doerr responded: “Ideas are easy, execution is everything,” and said it was General Colin Powell who said: “Innovation without execution is hallucination.”
Strike three against Mr Doerr though unfortunately. It was Thomas Edison not Colin Powell and he said “Vision without execution is hallucination.”
