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[technologyreview.com...]
An interesting read and perhaps new knowledge to a few people ;)
Excellent article.
It’s easy to go out and buy 10,000 computers—all you need is cash. It’s much harder to make those computers all work together as a single service that supports millions of simultaneous users.
Ah, well, <ahem> cash can be a problem for some of us. So, it's nice when technology solves that for you. G and A had the expertise to take advantage of the breathtaking speed at which the prices of hardware and bandwidth dropped.
At the same time, they watched the bottom line. They could, indeed, write elegant code to increase their speed and capacity on a box, but that takes time. Time, if you haven't heard, is money.
Often simply putting the task together is Java with a few really smart guys who can keep the big picture ($) in mind is faster. And in the computer biz, faster to market is cheaper and smarter because it's a moving target that requires speed to keep up with.
Just a couple of years ago I was marketing a software package that was to be integrated into the clients operations. Simple and straightforward. But, we couldn't sell it. It was possible to run it as an ASP, but the CEO of my firm--a super geek--went nuts at the suggestion of managing our own hardware. "We're not going hire a staff to babysit the servers and spend $$$$ (I don't remember the number, but it was too large for us to handle) on leasing the hardware! That's not our business!" I had checked it out and it didn't look that expensive to me, but I'm not a geek, so I didn't argue much.
I oiffered to cut a deal with an outfit who had the hardware we needed and could use our software. "Yeah, that works," the CEO came back with. "OK," I replied. "Now, so as to know how much to give away, you need to get a current price on hosting our ASP."
He made the calls and, as I said, it was breathtaking how prices had dropped in the 14 months since he had last looked at it. It was now pocket change. "Never mind," he said. He had the ASP up and running in six weeks. And now I'm a multimillionaire. (ha)
G and A's success in large part comes from their ability to know when to let the hardware do the job and when to let the software go to work. And, unlike a lot of firms, the answer was often "hardware," not software. Which is not to take anything away from their software.
First you had the dotcom boom, then it's very rapid drop. Now it seems as though 'establishment' is taking over and 'mom and pop' businesses, although they will still have a place and an audience, will not be the force of the web.
Everyone with an idea used to be able to use this internet-thing to make something from nothing. My own business started up with £200 from the sale of my car and a busted old computer. I know for a fact that I could not have done the things I did then, now.
I would end up having to use a low budget (and unreliable) hosting firm, get conned out of £100 to a Link Exchange firm who preyed on my naivity, study for weeks on end trying to work out SEO only to find out that it would take many months to get to the top of my field, which would then lead me to flush the remaining £100 down the Adwords-toilet only saving £5 to buy a cheap bottle of whisky to warm myself while I sleep in the gutter.
Anyway, point is, all power to G & A, they deserve their success because they've never set out to con hard working individuals out of their money. Here's hoping it continues this way.
Google has reportidly over 100k servers in operation.
