More thoughts on the Google datacenter
A while ago I wrote about the significance of the Google datacenter as an operational innovation. I suggested that IT folks struggling with maintaining infrastructure might consider outsourcing to Google:
If I were an IT manager I'd want to know if I could move my file/email services to Google, with Gmail as the email client.
Yesterday Google started offering a limited beta of hosted email services. And earlier this week a new version of Google Desktop that searches across multiple computers (and stores an index on the Google servers) was released, as well as Gmail/Gtalk integration.
I'm just a casual observer of these things, but I think these product releases point to the central role that the datacenter will play in Google's services (despite the serious and legitimate privacy issues). In a networked world the datacenter is what DOS was to the PC. It's the backbone; and Google has made theirs bigger, faster and cheaper than anyone else.
My guess is that over the next five years the datacenter will emerge as Google's core competency[*]. And if that's the case, they will ingest significantly more content than anyone else and create more ways of finding and using it (and monetizing it). They'll not only need storage volume, but computing capacity for data mining and algorithms and APIs and everything else that renders raw information useful.
The irony, of course, is that hundreds of thousands of cheap, commodity computer parts could end up being Google's sustained competitive advantage.
[*] So what about search? I think Yahoo is basically on par with Google now--meaning that in a blind "taste test" most people couldn't tell Yahoo results from Google. The only major difference that isn't related to branding or user habit is advertising (Yahoo seems to have more).
Google's license for PageRank--the patent is held by Stanford--expires in 2011. By then every other search company will have access to it (and who knows how significant it really is in Google's current mix of algorithms).
