Amazon has been expanding outside of their core retail space (e.g. AWS, advertising, services, etc) while Facebook has been eating Google's advertising dollars for a while.
I wouldn't go as far to say that Google doesn't care about Apple/Microsoft, but in both cases Apple has presents on their platforms and still makes money on them. They are only competitors if you view Android as something Google makes money with rather than something Google uses to advertise Google's services.
> Facebook has been eating Google's advertising dollars for a while.
All I've ever heard are horror stories about how advertising on Facebook does not work. I definitely don't see how ads on a social network can compete with ads on the largest search engine and almost every ad funded website in the world.
HN is famously... not neutral in regard to Google. Not necessarily because anyone's doing anything nefarious, but because early users came from certain places and formed a certain culture. You won't get a neutral perspective on Facebook's effectiveness here.
Facebook advertising has been very effective and profitable for at least some clients. I think Google+ shows that Google is terrified of Facebook. I have no knowledge of how Google's advertising revenue is doing, and wouldn't be at all surprised if they still dwarfed Facebook.
Using the Facebook platform for advertising can be extremely effective and profitable. Facebook Ads on the other hand have been lacklustre at best. They can be effective to drive activity to a Social campaign on Facebook, but are immensely less effective then google's ad products.
On the other hand, google knows it is likely just a matter of time before Facebook gets it right, and when they do they are one of the few companies who could complete at scale with google.
They're very different ad platforms. Google is great for targeting purchase intent. I think of Google ads sort of like coupons.
But people spend way more time on Facebook. It's entertainment, whereas Google is a tool. So brand advertising works better on Facebook. It's more like TV advertising.
Facebook's ad revenue share has been increasing, while Google's has been decreasing. In just two years, Google has gone from owning 10x as much ad revenue share as Facebook to just 2x [0]. Facebook has much more data on its users (age, location, school, etc) than Google which allows advertisers to target their ads much easier. It seems like Facebook is better if you want to narrowly reach a specific demographic since they know so much about their users, whereas Google is better if you just want to broadly reach a lot of people since they have such a dominant presence on the web. It depends on what you want as an advertiser, but there's definitely people who would prefer to spend their advertising dollars on a specific demographic.
I'm baffled to think that one company providing its own advertising for its own website is constituting such a huge portion of web ads in general, considering there are thousands of websites using Google Adsense that somehow live off the ad revenue.
Conversely, I have clicked on Google ads only to find that I have blocked the ad domain using my hosts file (which I had forgotten). I have never clicked on Facebook ads, as I don't have an account there.
Weird, I know. Actually, I do have an account but only used it to write a Facebook app for a client, not for actual use on that mini-Internet (kind of like Geocities isn't it?)
Does MS hate Apple? I would wager they don't, since they have a patent cross-licensing deal with Apple and a couple partnerships (Apple uses Azure for iCloud and Bing for searching).
Google definitely hates MS, as evidenced by how childish they act when it comes to Windows Phone. Apple hates Google, Microsoft hates Google, Google hates Microsoft. I'd say that's likely how it goes.
MS hating Apple is like Apple hating IBM; they're old wars and now the former enemies are new allies. Google/Samsung is the current war. For future wars, who can say?
I don't think that MS and Apple hates each other (by MS and Apple I'm thinking about leadership and the general sentiment among engineers). But I'm pretty sure that MS and Apple hates everything Google.
I recently left Microsoft for a startup, but spent about 4 years there on several teams. From my experience nobody really hates anyone. The tech industry is still a fairly small community. Most everybody has friends who work at all the competitors and a significant amount of people have worked at several of the big companies. So while everyone competes, I don't think hate is the right word.
Generally, the fanaticism in HN comments is much stronger than the sentiment of anyone actually working at these places.
I don't think that MS hates Google so much, at least they are releasing Office for Android. Google on the other side, tries not only doesn't support Windows Phone, they also try to prevent MS themselfs to offer Google Support, like being seen on the Youtube App.
I don't know, but they are competitors in one huge market: desktop computers (sort of) and operating systems. If there's one company that's successfully taking down Windows, that's Apple (with Mac OS X).
> I don't know, but they are competitors in one huge market: desktop computers (sort of) and operating systems.
Kind of, but not really. Apple gives its operating system away for free, and sells hardware. Microsoft sells its operating system to OEMs and business customers. They aren't directly competing in the way that Coke and Pepsi are.
And Windows (of some version) still has >90% market share for desktop OSes, so OSX is not a credible threat to Microsoft in that space. Microsoft's biggest obstacle in the desktop OS space is Windows XP.
OS X is a credible threat to Microsoft in the high end desktop market, which is the only place where its OEMs can make money (and are not making money right now); the Windows ecosystem can't survive with 90% marketshare but only 40% profit share.
But Apple is more concerned these days in selling iPhones, which makes them a lot of money. And Microsoft wants in on that (disclosure: Microsoft employee, but speaking for myself).
