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Comment by dmayle | Hacker News Reader

I may be a bit biased, because I'm a Googler... but looking through this thread and seeing all the people downplaying Google's contributions to Go, Android and Dart. As if they were minor...

But what about all of the papers that have changed the way the world does computing? Some choice links below:

MapReduce http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html

BigTable http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable.html

Dremel Paper http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html

Chubby Paper http://research.google.com/archive/chubby.html

Urs Holzle on OpenFlow: http://youtu.be/VLHJUfgxEO4

Megastore Paper http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36971.html

Spanner Paper http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html

Granted, some of these will take awhile before having implementations outside of Google... but you can't deny the impact of this work...

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Papers that have changed the way the world does computing? You must be kidding. A few thousand companies using (largely) poorly constructed products based on some papers is not changing the world of computing.

Bell labs created the first transistor for goodness sakes. The photovoltaic cell. The first gas laser! Wifi! TDMA and CDMA. The CCD. Hell half the concepts of modern operating systems came from Bell Labs.

Mind you, Bell Labs had 90 years to do all this, but to even pretend like Google compares is hubris.

Most companies running data centers are now copying the way Google runs data centers, Google essentially reinvented large scale data center management. Most of the online services that most people on the planet earth now consume in some part or leverage the knowledge that was published in the papers listed above.

You can look at data centers before and after Google the same way people look at smartphones before and after the iPhone.

And Android didn't change things? Practically every new non-Apple consumer electronics device that has any kind of UI uses the AOSP.

Most companies running data centers are now copying the way Google runs data centers

Most companies don't run data centers. Of the ones that does, the vast majority don't look a thing like Google because very, very few companies have computing requirements that look anything like Google's

And Android didn't change things?

Changing the marketplace doesn't mean innovating. You can be very successful (as Google is) without leaving so much as a footnote in history of invention.

Most companies don't run data centers.

Most companies don't build transistors. Just sayn'

> Most companies running data centers are now copying the way Google runs data centers

Most large tech companies perhaps but once you get out of a few major players this sadly isn't yet the case.

> Google essentially reinvented large scale data center management.

Almost everything Google has done are evolutionary refinements to long-running practice in HPC data centers which had long been doing automated provisioning and management, custom power & heat management, etc. for the same reasons: they couldn't afford not to.

Could you disambiguate something for me? I was under the impression that more people ran things the Amazon way than the Google way. That is, I see various places which have OpenStack and Amazon EC2/S3 portability, and I assumed they looked more towards Amazon for how to run this sort of thing than Google. (Eg, to my limited understanding, the Amazon details is more well published.)

While there's some mix and match, and Google and Amazon no doubt learn a bit from each other, how do you conclude that Google is the main reference?

For example, if I search for "how to run a data center" I find http://www.forrester.com/Five+Data+Center+And+IT+Infrastruct... , which talks about "Amazon. Salesforce.com. Microsoft. Rackspace" in the abstract, and does not mention Google.

Bell labs didn't invent either the transistor or the laser:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911981

I give Bell huge credit for the work they did - in most ways that is more important. But don't undersell Google's work in the fundamentals of AI science and their contributions to software engineering.

They also didn't invent the photovoltaic cell (that was 19th century tech, Bell labs was founded in 1925), nor wifi (that was NCR, which was acquired by AT&T after they did wavelan, not to mention ignoring significant work by other parties like CSIRO), and the theory behind CDMA also predates Bell Labs work on it.

They were certainly a giant, even the giant, but the GP is giving them credit for other people's work. If the argument is "invention counts, refinement doesn't" in an attempt to exclude google, well, Bell loses out a lot as well.

I don't know what the few years after the transistor's first appearance actually seemed like, but we've got 65+ years of perspective working for us to appreciate it.

Those "papers" do represent actual inventions, no matter how condescendingly you say the word "papers". And inventions only a handful of years old at that.

I'd venture a guess that many of AT&Ts inventions were (or would be, given a wider audience like we have today) looked down upon in a similar way - there were probably people who said "Ha! A toy like that? A couple of screws and some silly wires? We've already got _____ that can get that done, that clunky thing will never be practical."

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Then again, I also think its a good thing that with more resources at our disposal we can take such a critical eye to work being produced by capitalistic companies, and as practices and inventions enter the industry, more easily take them for what they are really worth.

Keep up the good work! Google is a giant standing on the shoulders of giants. The nay sayers with their devil's advocate arguments are just keeping you on your toes!

Google did not invent the search engine, they reinvented it. We can thank Google rather than anyone else (including Tim Berners Lee) for placing the wealth of the world's information at our fingertips. Walk into any office and you will see Google Maps on screen somewhere. Again, Google did not invent maps but it is Google Maps that everyone uses.

Thanks to the efforts of Google we no longer need to know 'general knowledge', i.e. the stuff that wins prizes in quiz shows. We can use our brains for storing more useful stuff. This is tantamount to evolution. As mentioned, keep up the good work!

According to Wikipedia, Bell Labs most notably contributed to the invention of "radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language". Google doesn't come close to such groundbreaking innovations [1]. Granted, there's not a whole lot of those these days but it can't be a coincidence that innovation slowed down at the same moment Bell Labs was downsized. Google doesn't help with that.

[1] MapReduce is probably the most important thing Google researched but it only helps with companies' computing load, much like AT&T's telephony protocol improvements we never talk about.

> But what about all of the papers that have changed the way the world does computing?

Is this a joke?

It's like comparing invention of a new hemorrhoids drug to the discovery of DNA.

One has niche uses and the other creates new industries and revolutionizes science. It's hardly the same.

You guys did not invent map-reduce!!

There is map-reduce the algorithm, and then there is map-reduce the distributed computing mechanism. Unfortunately they share a name, but Google engineers definitely did invent the map-reduce being referred to here.

They most certainly did not, any more than Apple invented the smartphone — the core algorithm would have been familiar to a mainframe COBOL programmer, after all, and the distributed aspect was common under other names in scientific computing or relational databases. I'd be somewhat surprised if they didn't first hear about it at some place like Stanford and realize how promise there was in a cleaner, less crufty implementation than the various HPC job schedulers or hacked-up shell scripts managed by hapless grad-students around the world.

None of the above is intended to diminish their achievements: in fact, I think the reverse is true because the industry history is littered with people who had great ideas and never really implemented them well. Big ideas just aren't worth as much as the many engineer-years of hard work it took Google to go from a concept to massive-scale HPC being a routine, commodity service. It's easy to say “Google succeeded because Larry and Sergey had two key Big Ideas” but that ignores the huge accomplishment they made in actually building a sustainable company which took those ideas to massive scale.

Those contributions are great, but most of them will fade out after several years.

Go, Android, and Dart are minor.

The biggest impact is Android, and that's revolutionary how exactly?

Search and maps weren't revolutionary? Easy to miss, I guess - after all, who ever uses those niche items?

It's inventions like the Karnaugh Map and the MOSFET that changed how the world does computing. I don't mean to downplay the technical merits of BigTable or Megastore, but all they really changed is how salesmen sell things.

Actually map reduce as a programming paradime predates Google by a long way - Dialcom/BT where using it back in the 80's for billing systems.

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