Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google as a graduate-school project run from a Silicon Valley garage. Since then, the project-turned-$120-billion Fortune 500 Company has maintained this stubborn
do-it-yourself approach to technology, writes
The New York Times. Google is building massive data centers worldwide, including that huge one the
Times wrote about in The Dalles, Ore.,
with technologies designed to reduce its immense need for electricity. These computers will run on software designed by Google, and there are even signs they will run on company-prepared microchips.
"Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine," says one Gartner analyst. "They are building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost unimaginable." One
Yahoo vice president of operations is skeptical of Google's grand-scale ambitions. Can one company focus on building the most popular Web destination while designing the world's most complex hardware
infrastructure at the same time? Well, Google has decided to both--and in so doing, it would appear that the company is sticking to its central tenet: "to design a network of machines that can store
and process more information more efficiently than anyone else." In other words, to store and make searchable the world's information. Because it completes its operations in house, analysts estimate
that Google's computing costs are half those of other large Internet firms. Bill Gates has admitted that Microsoft probably spends more per machine than Google. But Google is so secretive about its
technology that all this is hard to say with any authority.
Read the whole story at The New York Times »