In an interview with Wired magazine, Google’s chief executive Larry Page said that Facebook is doing a “really bad job on their products” and Apple’s limited offerings are “unsatisfying”.
Making a dig at Facebook, he said that although it is a company that is strong in the social space, "they're also doing a really bad job on their products.”
He went on to say: “We're actually doing something different [from Facebook]. I think it's outrageous to say that there's only space for one company in these areas."
In the interview he didn’t comment on what products he felt were, specifically, “really bad”, but speculation has led many to think Page was hinting at Facebook’s privacy settings.
Commenting on Google+, Google’s own social network, which has only 500 million users compared to Facebook’s billion-plus, Page said: "I'm very happy with how it has gone … a lot of it has been copied by our competitors, so I think we're doing a good job."
Again, Page failed specify what parts he felt had been copied.
Apple also came under criticism from the Google exec, and of it he said that it lacked ambition to change the world: "You know, we always have these debates: we have all this money, we have all these people, why aren't we doing more stuff?
“You may say that Apple only does a very, very small number of things, and that's working pretty well for them. But I find that unsatisfying."
He went on to say that many companies decay over time because they "do approximately what they did before, with a few changes". Such incremental change, he says, "is guaranteed to be obsolete over time."
Page declined to comment on Apple's decision to remove Google's Maps as a default for the iPhone, but did say: "You may have the greatest maps in the world, but if nobody uses them, it doesn't matter."