Google’s Homegrown Goods
Home-made products tend to vary in quality. Baked goods, for example, are usually far better coming out of an oven than a cardboard box. More complicated projects - such as kit cars, which are notoriously temperamental and unreliable - tend to underachieve in comparison to off-the-shelf versions. But Google is challenging this convention, according to some, by creating products to meet its needs.
Google's inventions were originally born, like so many others, out of necessity. For the fledgling start-up, penny-pinching was a must, and so the site's creators cobbled together various components as was necessary. It turned out they were good at it. That tradition has continued, even as the company grew into its current rich-corporation configuration.
Various reports and rumors indicate that Google creates many of its own servers, programs, and other components. Not all of these attempts meet with success - some of Google's servers are connected by Velcro to facilitate the swapping-out of failed units. And as noted in a New York Times article, Urs Holzle, Google's senior vice president for operations, has said, "Nobody builds servers as unreliably as we do."
Google still thinks its approach is cost-efficient. In the same article, Alan Eustace, Google's vice president for research and systems engineering, is quoted. "We don't think our competitors can deploy systems cheaper, faster or at scale," he said. One must admit that whatever the company has been doing, it's certainly worked for them so far.
Looking into the future, there has been an increasing amount of publicity linking Google to Sun Microsystems. Mark Stahlman, an independent technology analyst, indicated another direction in a comment to the New York Times, asserting, "Google's next step is to build high-performance silicon." Either move would be important - imagine if Google followed both paths. For now, we're left to admire Google's current crop of homemade accomplishments.
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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.
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