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• What Wold Microsoft Do (Editor's Blog)
• A Google OS by 2010 (Article)
• GooOS (Blog)
• The new 'G' o/s (Article)

If Google = Good and AOL = Evil, then AOL is now 5% good and Google is now 2% evil.

Entropy dictates that over time, the goodness and evilness of both will continue towards each other until they reach stability.

Like THIS? Speak your query into the phone, it spits out a X-digit number. Go to your browser and open the results page, type in your # and bam, your results... sites has a story about Google developing a voice-in -> voice-out search interface... It would take a lot of work, good voice recognition, and a good interface for returning results(clear, understandable list over voice).

Your link doesn't seem to work. Here is Here is another one. Its the first I heard of it, its real interesting if true. It is pretty disturbing to hear that a 54 year old guy was fired right before an IPO, and they apparently screwed him out of $10 million dollars in options. To top it off a Google VP may have told the guy he was "incompatible with Google's youthful atmosphere", grounds for a successful age discrimination law suit if its substantiated.

This kind of confirms what I suspected about Google. I suspect Larry and Sergei mean well at heart but as soon as Google started to look like an IPO bonanza Googles ranks almost inevitably filled up with greedy people willing to do anything to make their killing that is mostly all you find in the valley any more. If they screwed him out of $10 million in options, then you see, thats more for everyone else to divvy up.

Unfortunately Silicon Valley as a whole is so infected with greed now I'm not sure it will ever be the great innovator it once was or even a barely tolerable place to work. Some greed is good, to much is a stalking killer.

The times I've lived in the valley nearly everyone there seemed to have one and only one mantra:

- Get the biggest piece of the hottest IPO you can find. Kiss up to or screw anyone necessary to get it.

Not sure I would trust anyone in the cabal that is Mt. View, Palo Alto or Stanford since they were infected with this disease. You see all the same names on their resumes, Netscape, SUN, @Home, SGI. You sense they are just bouncing from one source of hot IPO buzz to another in a desperate search for more 'F' you money.

You can be confident they will do anything necessary to acquire the most options possible, and sometimes that means incredible, stellar performance, othertimes it just means back stabbing and ask kissing. As soon as they can cash out the IPO then they are gone to the next killing or a luxurious and often ill deserved retirement. It is a system designed to fuel breakthroughs, it isn't a system designed to create businesses that last and that have sound values.

getting some info of google's current hardware in here seems a good idea. here goes.

here is a nice article. The company estimates that a server running Google applications all day is the equivalent of 40 years of use in a regular context. Approximately 82 of these servers die every day, but not completely; Google employs maintenance people who walk around with carts of hard disks, for example, and replace them in malfunctioning servers or UPSes.

here, i googled for you