
Lars Rasmussen, Father Of Google Maps And Google Wave, Heads To Facebook - px
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/29/rasmussen-facebook-google/
======
swah
These days, do you guys feel like Google and Facebook are equally cool places
to work on innovative and world-changing projects with other smart folks?

~~~
garply
No. A lot of my former classmates from Stanford work at Google and Facebook.
Among the engineers, there is a pretty clear trend that the more hacker-like
ones are at Google (or Microsoft Research) and the more financially-motivated
ones (primarily concerned with prestige, nice car, nice house, meals @ the
French Laundry) are at Facebook. Maybe it's just that the latter couldn't get
into the former company, I'm not sure. Among the non-engineers (human
resources, etc), the employees that I know look a lot more similar.

~~~
ambition
I can't and won't say anything about Google, but I will say that your
implication that we Facebook employees are greedy, un-hacker-like and unable
to get into Google is inaccurate and unfair.

I can't argue on any objective basis on the financial motivation point. (How
would I measure that? How did -you- measure that?) I will say that in my
experience my coworkers are primarily motivated by the ability to have a
outsized impact and the ability to work with great independence.

Facebook has a crazy-passionate hacker culture. Tons of engineers have really
neat side projects, and plenty of these ship. Every six weeks or so we have
(voluntary) all night hackathons, where there is plenty of food and drink, and
the agreed task is simply to build something cool not related to our usual
work.

Finally, P(Could work at Google | Works at Facebook) is really high. As
evidenced by a recent news article, hundreds of Facebook people are actually
Google alumni. I know many of my coworkers turned down Google offers to come
here, and it's practically routine for new grad hires to have a Google offer
as leverage in coming to FB.

~~~
garply
Hi ambition, I was painting with pretty broad strokes, and I did not intend to
say Facebook employees are "greedy" (I do not believe I did say that). I meant
that the value systems of the people I know in both places tend to be slightly
different.

One way to quantify the difference between the two types of engineers (if
there is such a difference, as I hypothesize), would be to measure the volume
of their open-source work prior to joining the companies. Maybe just number of
contributed-to projects X years before joining as a rough estimate? Actually,
I'd be interested in seeing that data for employees across the board at the
major SV tech companies.

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charlief
Well now that Lars is gone, the possibility of a complete revision and UX
revamp of Wave has gone up.

~~~
swombat
Why is that?

~~~
charlief
If I had to guess, most of the revamped UX will come in their Wave in a Box
project[1].

What we know:

a. Lars and his brother Jens have been a team or working colleagues for at
least a while (maybe since 1999)[2]. They co-founded Where 2 Technologies in
2003 which got acquired by Google in 2004 and became the core for Google Maps.

b. A big proportion of the Google Wave complaints surrounded the UX, both for
end-users and devs.

c. Lars on Wave "On the team after a year and a half, when we started using
it, it still took us a while on how to use it... how to be more productive
using it." [3] The whole video is a good watch for those interested, and so
you get the context of the quote as well. We can gather that Google Wave
germinated from a very organic process including the UX.

d. Google's Wave in a Box project will include a subset of the functionality
(simplification) of Google Wave. " _This (Wave in a Box) project will not have
the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today. However, we intend
to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers
and host waves on their own hardware_ "[1]

What I think but really do not know and I suck at writing:

* With Lars leaving, it adds _liquidity_ to the possibility of further change on Google Wave development or integration. It makes it pretty certain that the leadership on the project, Wave in a Box, or subsequent integration projects will at least be tweaked. This will be further confirmed if Jens leaves as well (a), but we have no idea at this point if he will.

* Losing Lars maybe Jens maybe others and they will lose a big whack of their engineering leadership on Wave, so you can expect further developments on the core technology to slow tremendously. What's left is the community building, repackaging, marketing, open-source, maybe some hope in monetization, some more experimentation, package and publish extensible protocols[4], maybe trying an adoption experiment (Wave in a Box, maybe enterprises will use it!!!, let's fight Outlook), maybe some hope in leveraging the existing technologies with integration, etc. Google Wave's team is probably focused just on that, and the head caveat on those tasks is the UX. They'll probably bring in or already have some outstanding UX folks. Maybe the leadership on that front wasn't there from the start, but we don't know as it was created in a very organic fashion (c).

* Google is a master at integration in most cases. Just look back at all the acquisitions that went really well, and on top of that, Wave is using most of the Google ecosystem already. While the Wave in a Box project continues, you can probably expect some Google Wave functionality and technology to pop up here and there. I wouldn't be surprised if it makes an incremental and subtle appearance in some of GMail's functionality in the way Buzz has, but we don't know.

* Most of us would agree that Google Wave won't be coming back in its current form because the tarnished reputation. Such an event is more unlikely than finding a black swan, more like finding a transparent swan who can do calculus, but even finding one of those can happen. It will be interesting to see what happens with Wave in a Box, Google Wave Federation Protocol, and Google's ecosystem, hopefully good things.

[1] [http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-
source-n...](http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-
steps-wave-in-box.html)

[2] <http://au.linkedin.com/pub/lars-rasmussen/5/519/16>
<http://au.linkedin.com/pub/jens-eilstrup-rasmussen/5/192/890>

[3] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl1_MmnhJpA#t=2m32s>

[4] <http://www.waveprotocol.org/>

~~~
swombat
Why would Google be doing anything whatsoever with Wave when they've basically
killed the project, though? I wasn't aware that they were keeping anything
more than maintenance resources on it?

~~~
charlief
Well they grew from 5 to 50 people over a couple years, built up an office
space, that's at least a few million dollars (many few) sunk in, and lots of
good stuff came out of it They currently have at least 7 developers working on
wave protocol if you check the google code page. Here are some of the recent
developments:

1\. <http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/> <http://www.waveprotocol.org/>

2\. Wave Protocol summit is in November
[http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/10/wave-protocol-
summ...](http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/10/wave-protocol-summit-
november-8-12th.html)

3\. Wave in a Box (server + client) (vs Outlook in enterprises?) A very
interesting adoption experiment, and if they separate it enough from the
cloud, it will be a straight-forward germination in Outlook's market down the
road. [http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-
source-n...](http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-
steps-wave-in-box.html)

4\. If they're doing this much in public, you can bet there are a few
integration projects at home as well.

<http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/> <http://googlewave.blogspot.com/> for
Wave updates, definitely isn't dead I would say.

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jdp23
Actually according to the article it's not confirmed that he's heading for
Facebook.

It'll be hard to top Google Wave. I wonder what he'll work on next?

~~~
daviding
Facebook has an email platform / inbox metaphor thing. I bet (i.e. I have no
idea what I'm talking about) that he's probably still interested in new forms
of collaboration. Maybe under the guise of a Facebook tweak we'll see some
Wave concepts reappear. I did always wonder if Wave would be some sort of
gmail labs bolt on, and perhaps Facebook is keen on that for their platform...

~~~
jdp23
It's interesting to think about Facebook cross-fertilizing with Wave but man,
hard to believe it would lead to a decent UX.

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netaustin
Who knows what he'll work on at Facebook? Maps and Wave are kind of unrelated,
conceptually. Facebook could use him for something related to geolocation for
Places, or they could want him to lead some inbox/chat integration project.
Maybe they want him to revamp their photo uploader. He's a programmer, not a
collaboration guru; surely they've got 100s of ideas that could use his
massive brains.

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yanw
Should they have kept Wave alive to keep him?

I think that these supposedly high profile departures might not be such a bad
thing for Google, they might find a new Lars in their ranks that won't cost as
much to retain (until she/he hits gold).

