Chuck0 wrote:
Innovation? Google services are the product of its people and its organizational culture. Once these people get millions from the IPO, all of that chemistry will bubble over.
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Again, I must disagree.
Google has indeed produced something quite new which forms the backbone of their service.
from --
<http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.html >
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?
....
A distributed, Internet-based operating system is a non-trivial innovation. As users, we only see the website -- Google.com -- and assume it's merely a server (or series of servers) running a fairly conventional search algorithm the way previous search technologies did. But this is not the case.
I can't speak to what will happen once the IPO business is over and done with and I don't believe in hero worship so I'm not attempting to cast Google's owners as saints but it's not accurate to say Google is simply another ho hum tech firm. What they've done, from a technical POV, is quite staggering in both established fact and implication.
.d.