NYT had an interesting article on Google’s inventor culture. An interesting little known fact about Google is:
“Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine,” said Martin Reynolds, an analyst with the Gartner Group. “They are building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost unimaginable.” He said he believed that Google was the world’s fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.
It is going against the common wisdom:
At some point you have to ask yourself what is your core business,” said Kevin Timmons, Yahoo’s vice president for operations. “Are you going to design your own router, or are you going to build the world’s most popular Web site? It is very difficult to do both.”
Google, in fact, has decided it will do both. In many ways, it still has the head of a graduate-school project grafted onto the body of a multinational corporation. The central tenet of its strategy is that its growing cadre of world-class computer scientists can design a network of machines that can store and process more information more efficiently than anyone else.
I think Google is gettting its fingers in too many pies.
First, I must say it is genius to be able to use cheap, unreliable server to build a totally reliable network, lightning fast network. But where does it stop.
I recently read rumors that Google was perhaps planning its own silicon chip. Now that is probably going to far when there is so much advancement yet to be made in search.