
Google: We're One Of The World's Largest Hardware Makers - Anon84
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/google_makes_servers/
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maxko87
This, along with rising popularity of Chromebooks, makes Google's future seem
like a cenrtralized data store/processor. Kind of an eerie thought.

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lunarscape
Eerie indeed given their existing vast bulk of personal data from emails to
browsing habits. Now they want to be the portal to the entire web for people
via Chromebooks and hold _all_ their data. That makes the cynical part of me
glad that Google+ hasn't been overly successful.

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idspispopd
Search, Analytics, Plus, Mail, Android. Search & Analytics & Plus have allowed
them to track you around the web. Mail & Plus have provided them with your
real name, your relations/contacts and other personal details. Android gives
them your phone number and location.

I believe part of the reason they are so steadfast in having real names for
Plus is because Mail wasn't 100% successful in getting the actual names of
users.

Everyone of their services is designed to gather a specific kind of
information about the user. (Play a game and predict their next service based
on the kind of information you'd expect them to want of you. I'm going with
world wide payment systems.)

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InclinedPlane
I find it fascinating that Google is more than a decade old already and yet
nobody has been able to completely copy all of their major innovations.

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sp332
What "major innovation" did Google have 10 years ago that hasn't been copied?

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InclinedPlane
OK, so, if you look at what has set google apart you see three different
things. Hardcore CS savvy is one of them, which led to pagerank. Then you have
solid software engineering talent which led to the implementation of pagerank
through map reduce and sharding. And combined with that you have
revolutionarily different data centers. To google a data center is a single
unit at many levels (application level, servicing level, manufacturing).

Google manufactures what are arguably single data center sized computers, and
makes the software to run on it. This sort of vertical integration is a huge
advantage to google, because it gives them a huge quality/price/performance
benefit, allowing them to leverage CPU cycle more effectively, more
efficiently, and more inexpensively than their competition. Can you come up
with an example of a company that scales the same way that google does to the
same degree?

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sp332
Of course there are lots of other search engines that use pagerank. Sharding
is of course nothing new. Map-reduce is a smart way to increase throughput of
a cluster, but it's not unique (after all there is a popular open-source
Hadoop project). I'll give you the data center advances though :)

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InclinedPlane
Exactly, there are a lot of bits and pieces duplicating things that google did
in the late 90s but there's nobody out there who's doing all those things at
once. Which is surprising because there are huge business advantages to doing
so. But it requires a level of execution that only google has been able to
pull off so far.

Edit: on the one hand it's an impressive achievement on google's part and a
testament to their exceptional competence. On the other hand it's a bit
disappointing because it means that google is that much harder to compete with
and diversity in the marketplace is always a good thing (no matter how
benevolent the rule of the monopolist of the moment might be).

