In all, Elliot Schrage’s impeding departure as Google’s Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs has sent ripples throughout coffee tables at the Silicon Valley. After all, it isn’t the first time that Facebook has managed to coerce Google’s elite to hop over.

So far, the slew of prolific Google employees that moved over to Facebook works out in a list of top flyers that included the likes of:

• Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s ex-Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations
• Gideon Yu, Youtube’s ex-CFO
• Benjamin Ling, Google’s ex-1337 Engineer
• Justin Rosenstein, Google’s ex-Product Manager of Google Pages and ex-GDrive 1337 Developer
• Ethan Beard, Google’s ex-Director of Social Media

Well, the idea of having someone like Elliot Schrage coming aboard with a team of ex-Google seems like a cause for a celebration. That would have been too much excitement to hold back. The following is a leaked memo that Mark Zuckerberg had sent out to the peons at Facebook:

Hey Everyone –

I’m writing from India to share with you the good news that Elliot Schrage will be joining our management team as VP Communications and Public Policy. In this role, he will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do. The goal here is to help people understand how the internet can strengthen people’s relationships. Elliot will direct our efforts to work with users, media, governments and other entities around the world to ensure that Facebook’s policies are transparent, responsive, effective and are recognized as being those things.

Elliot is joining us from Google where he has been their VP Global Communications and Public Affairs since 2005. At Google, he broadened the company’s messaging from a focus on only product PR to include all aspects of corporate, financial, policy, philanthropic and internal communications. Before that, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a public policy think tank, as a professor at Columbia Business School and as SVP at Gap. Early on, he began his career as a Harvard-trained lawyer.

This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness, and honest internal communications.

Elliot will be starting on May 14, although you may see him around the office before then.

Nick Gonzalez noted that this ongoing phenomenon have been dubbed as the “Facebook problem”, a term coined by Google’s management at the undeniable exodus of top-ranking executives and engineers leaving for Facebook. It is not surprising to note, however, that Microsoft had once faced a similar situation as Google now did, for which Google had once poached the cream of the crop from Microsoft with the lure of a promising and satisfactory pay job that Microsoft can’t beat.

Could it be the same that Facebook is offering something a million times better than what Google has to offer? Or could it be that the taste of pre-IPO explosion is too much for anybody to miss out on? We all know how awesome the working environment at Google can be but do Facebook have something else that is by far the best ever?

When Erick Schonfeld inquired Ethan Beard about his departure from Google for Facebook, this was the message that he had received (via Facebook):

Yes, I can confirm that I have resigned from Google and will be going to work for Facebook.

I think Facebook is great for a variety of reasons: the company has an innovative product with amazing growth, the team they have assembled is first rate, and the business is at a very exciting time in its development. I am excited to join Facebook at a time and in a role where I can have a significant impact on its core business and bottom line.

Maybe the work environment at Google isn’t “sociable” after all. And that could be the reason why they are moving over.

Or maybe it is the pre-IPO carrot-on-a-stick offer that is too tasty to miss out on.

Tags: Facebook, google

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 17:01 and is filed under Facebook, Insight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.