Tuesday, March 20, 2007

The barrier to entry of Google scale

Philipp Lenssen transcribes part of an I-Innovate interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

An interesting excerpt on the competitive advantage Google has from its skill in building out its massive cluster:
In an internet market where you deliver your services by computers with spinning disks, we have a competitive advantage... because we have the cheapest and most scalable such architecture.

We hope that in the course of innovation we will be able to build products which are almost impossible for our competitors to replicate, because we simply learn how to implement them at scale.

The internet is a scaled business, and running large internet scale businesses is very, very difficult. All the challenges – staying up, dealing with spammers, dealing with other access problems – and we believe we do it best in the world.
See also some of my other posts on the power of the Google cluster, including "NYT on the Google cluster", "Google's big bandwidth acquisitions", "Google Sawzall", and "Four petabytes in memory".

See also my post, "Making the impossible possible", that quotes Google Earth CTO Michael Jones as saying, "Your perception of a thing that is a viable problem to think about is shaped by the tool you can use."

See also some of my posts ([1] [2]) about Microsoft's belated attempts to build their own cluster.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi!

What I believe is that the barrier is not as nearly as high as what they believe it is. The group that will comodotize what google is doing will have to key ingredients.

1) They will take the course of "Jedi Build their own Lightsabers". They will do it with open source technology and most likely will do it without keeping any of their source private.

2) They will do it by using less hardware then what Google is using. Today Google throws problems at the wall. The next Google will do it with a fraction of the hardware that today's Google uses.

Cheers,
-Brian