Happy New Year!!!
BA Forum Moderator
On that note, we may as well start with a 'prophesy'. Here's a 'drift'
on one of my favorite tech companies.. Google!
This article is from
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html and written by
Robert Cringely.
================================
Google-Mart
Sam Walton Taught Google More About How to Dominate the Internet Than
Microsoft Ever Did
By Robert X. Cringely
Play to your strengths. That's the key to success in any industry. This
is the week I promised to explain where I think Google is headed, and
playing to the company's strengths is key if they are going to do what
I think, which is effectively take over the Internet. Oh they won't
steal it or strong-arm us. They'll seduce us into giving it to them.
And I am not at all sure that's a bad thing.
Google's strengths are searching, development of Open Source Internet
services, and running clusters of tens of thousands of servers. Notice
on this list there is nothing about operating systems. There are many
rumors about Google doing an operating system to compete with
Microsoft. I'm not saying they aren't doing that (I simply don't know),
but I AM saying it would not be a good idea, because it doesn't play to
any of the company's traditional strengths.
The same follows for the rumor that Google, as a dark fiber buyer, will
turn itself into some kind of super ISP. Won't happen. And WHY it won't
happen is because ISPs are lousy businesses and building one as
anything more than an experiment (as they are doing in San Francisco
with wireless) would only hurt Google's earnings.
So why buy-up all that fiber, then?
The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages
in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular
GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping
container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google
hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to
cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power
support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron
processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off
overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these
puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the
entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.
While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most
sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are
about 300 worldwide.
Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to
have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to
having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault
tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They
offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that
no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer
super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no
incremental cost to Google.
Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire
data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an
example. Replicating that Victoria's Secret lingerie show that took
down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video
feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data
centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering
ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached
copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It
doesn't matter. To Google's local data center, bits are bits and the
system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet
TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still
offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.
As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit
locally, too. Two or three hops away from every user, they'll also be
completely backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your
data never goes away unless you erase it. Your latency and system
response are as low as they can possibly be made for a network app.
And remember the Google Web Accelerator that came and disappeared? It's
back! Only this time the Web Accelerator will have the proper hardware
and network infrastructure to make it worth using.
This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is
a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a
dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware.
There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet,
superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google
Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of
widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a
thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's
suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a
transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of
trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's
the goal.
All this is based, of course, on Google's proven network and hardware
expertise. Have you seen Google's Search Appliance? They ship you a 1U
prebuilt server. You connect it to your network, fill out a simple
configuration screen, and it scans and indexes your web site (or sites)
for you. Google monitors and manages it remotely, and sucks up the data
and adds it to theirs. You just plug the thing in and turn it on. It
just works. You need do nothing else to keep it running. Google
understands how to do this stuff. Microsoft definitely does not.
And there lies the differences between the two companies. Last week, I
wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft's best attempts
at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of
applications, too. But they'll build them atop a network infrastructure
that Microsoft can't match.
But that doesn't mean Microsoft customers will be denied access to the
Google Internet. Quite the contrary. Google would be insane to exclude
Microsoft customers, which will be as welcome as any other. Only Google
will be benefiting far more than Microsoft from that usage.
Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There are
only so many fiber networks and they'll be BUYING service from those
outfits -- many of which are in or near bankruptcy. Say the containers
cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That's $300
million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy
this is? Wal-Mart's. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to
allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies
will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no
medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we've thought of as a threatened
species, won't be touched, but then their profit margins are so low
they aren't worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the
roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0
IS Google.
Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are
like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1
billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each
year.
Game over.
And yet next week I'll take it one more step.
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Read more in ... http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051124.html