MS -> Yahoo -> Google -> Facebook

Couple of years ago, the Yahoo India outfit was getting badgered and really damaged because of the outflow of engineers to Google. Google in fact was hiring engineers from a lot of companies famous of recruiting good engineers - Microsoft, Trilogy, Amazon, Yahoo to name a few. At that time, it seemed that the only place there was anything getting done was Google.

Then sometime back, I heard some of my colleagues at Ugenie talk about how Google's amazing run will last only till a certain point of time after which they become yet another company. In fact, the company which spoils the party might do to Google, what Google did to Yahoo and others. In June'07, I read this post on Paul Kedrosky's Infection Greed blog about a Googler who left for Facebook and made the following comments about Facebook:

"That company that shows up once in a very long while -- the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other's genius. That company that's doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can't pull off. That company that's on the cusp of Changing The World, that's still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you'll kick yourself in three years if you don't jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land."

I was still thinking this was a one off incident before I read today of the recruitment war between Facebook and Google going on in Stanford. Has the time come for Google to be disrupted? Is it going to be Facebook? Shortly, we should all be able to see.