Google's Infrastructure is its Strategic Advantage

If this is news to anyone at all, they haven't been paying attention. Why else would Microsoft have been destroyed in the search race? The one thing they lack more than anything else is the expertise to build a scalable infrastructure. And it has destroyed them.

> Instead of trucks and assembly plants, however, Google's supply chain is made up of fiber networks, data centers, switches, servers and storage devices

That's what you think, isn't it? Reality is that they are nearly one and the same. QA is expensive when you farm it out -- so don't. Delivery is expensive -- handle it yourself. Assembly -- well, given commodity components and stamped parts to hold them, designed by talented industrial engineers for rapid assembly and disassembly, who needs a proper assembly line? Truth is stranger than fiction...

True story: One of my roommates at the time (2000-2001) came up with the idea to transport Google clusters (the old corkboard pieces of shit, not the relatively sleeker editions that followed) via truck. The initial run was a disaster -- it turns out that U-haul D-hooks are rated for about 80 pounds, not 800 as advertised, so one of those racks almost ended up on the 101 at rush hour when they took a turn a little too fast. Bonded, licensed carriers have been used for the deliveries ever since and Chris moved over from operations to purchasing ;-)

To say that Google's internal efficiency is like no other I've ever seen (and I have worked at IBM Microelectronics, for example, so I've seen some pretty hard-core automation) is to understate the matter. Apparently there is no lack of applications for this infrastructure (Amazon is the only other company that I have seen come close, and it's no surprise whatsoever that Google and Amazon used to choose many of the same datacenters before Google started building its own), my only concern is whether Wall Street realizes this. On second thought, given the fact that Wall Street basically drove the scaling of Unix the first time around, maybe that's why Google's stock price is up 800% since the IPO.

> It has been rumored to be a big buyer of dark fiber to connect its data centers,

Again -- if this is news to anyone at all...

Why pay someone else to do a shitty, unreliable job of transferring your data, when you can do it better and faster yourself? The devices to light up a piece of fiber sufficient to hook up a MAN are about $40K apiece -- chump change for the gain in efficiency and cost savings.

You can be king in two ways: bring the content or make the content.