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The IT Strategy That Makes Google Work
savio13 writes "InfoWeek published an article on Google's IT Strategy, which can be summarized as: 'Use customized open source where possible, custom build where necessary , and buy if it's not related to something that will give Google a competitive advantage.' The author interviewed several senior IT folks at Google and the article is surprisingly thorough considering how closely Google guards information about their actual IT environment." From the article: "Google managers tend to be reticent on the subject of IT strategy, they're loath to talk about specific vendors or products, and they clam up when asked about their servers and data centers. But a day spent with some of the company's IT leaders reveals there's more to Google's IT operations than a search engine running on a massive server farm. Behind the seeming simplicity is a mash-up of internally developed software, made-to-order hardware, artificial intelligence, obsession with performance, and an unorthodox approach to people management."
"The IT Strategy That Makes Google Work Today"
Everyone's talking about how bloated and old Microsoft is... give Google 10 or 15 years - rest assured we'll be seeing comments like "Where Did Google Go Wrong?" or "Google Delisted" or something like that.
Want to read about some cool Google "cooked up" technology?, read this white paper on the Google File System (one of the coolest, simplest, most elegant file systems I've seen).
Let me say that I'm a tech bad-ass with a ton of experience and gold stars, and when I applied to Google, their recruiters grilled the heck out of me, everyone I talked to was very skilled and found my weaknesses quicky, and I didn't get a job offer... despite the fact that many other companies continue to actively recruite me.
I was humbled
It consistently bugs me that so many companies think they can save money by taking the “not invented here” philosophy on as much as possible. I am convinced, especially after learning about the inner workings of Google, that this just does not work. So much time and effort is wasted getting third party products working for very specific tasks and when all is said and done, you can often put together a solution that meets your needs exactly in nearly the same amount of time. And then in the long run, even if you are successful at first, you will fight a larger maintenance and cost nightmare as your vendors shift and change directions and you find yourself wishing you had more specificity in the solution.
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Ok this basic approach has been done before. The American Airlines SABRE system which for years was THE strategic advantage of American Airlines. SABRE was a massive project that involved the custom development of an Operating System: TPF which IBM built specifically for extremely high speed transaction processing - much faster than CICS over MVS. SABRE also lead the development of very high performance non relational DB's. IMS and IDMS are direct offshoots from this work, in fact IDMS was probably the fastest general purpose DB ever until Teradata came along. On the hardware side, they squeezed performance out of the IBM TCM mainframe line that no one thought possible. IBM had trouble benchmarking it is was so fast and it was years before they even published their results.
But again, the basic approach was to start from scratch and build the biggest fastest business application system they could design. The problem with SABRE is that change control and management were nightmarish in their complexity.
What I'd be interested in learning is how Google handles patch management, security APARs, change control, health checking and all those mundane process driven chores that catch us all up.
And yes I am old geezer. I did extensive work in high performance CICS systems such as running CICS as a continuous communications task.
The article noted that Google uses a custom tuned Linux kernel. Does anybody know what changes (if any) Google has contributed back? I'd suspect that said tuning includes some kernel changes.
If a piece of software is responsible for a competitive advantage, it makes sense for Google to refrain from sharing it.
But Wall Street is setup so that you have to keep growing or die. You can have a healthy business in any other sense, but if you're not growing then you may as well be dead as far as The Street is concerned. Exhibit A - Microsoft. They have something like 70% profit margins, earn billions of dollars in pure profit every single quarter...yet they are considered a lackluster company and their reflects this perception.
So in order to satisfy Wall Street's appetite for growth companies keep...growing. Often way too fast. Many times this results in bad products in good potential markets, good products in bad markets, and bad products in bad markets. It takes staff to ramp up to develop all these misses. The money made before supports all these misses. You get a few too many of these misses and not only are you not growing anymore, but your bread and butter that once made you a Wall Street darling is now undercut by cheaper competition.
Exhibits B & C - SGI and Dell.
Anyway, right now Google is obviously in a growth phase. But there is nothing THAT new or innovative about what they're doing. (And many of the products people give them credit for was actually purchased by Google as many in this thread have pointed out for Google Earth.) They're just the most recent cool new company (that everyone's heard of) on the tech block.
I'd love to work with/for Google and I think they're a cool company, but a bit of perspective can be useful too. :)
Perhaps your difficulty is in someway related to your ego, o great "tech bad-ass".
[Z?]
Google and Apple have wildly different management styles.
Google is run for the engineers. The engineering managers are interviewed by engineers. If they don't know as much about engineering as the guys they manage, they don't get hired. So, the end result is engineers running at 100% efficiency, giving everything they have to every crazy project they come up with. The public then choose which products they like - its not like you have to splash out 1000 bucks to try a new google product out. And most hires come from friends of engineers. Much more important than a HR dept. that knows the difference between someone with a unix certification and the ability to create.
Apple is run by media people. Really good media people & industrial designers who are in those great social networks across the industry. Engineers produce stuff that the media people want. They may only be running at 70% efficiency, but they are told exactly what to do, and because the managers are usually right, the engineers are happy to go alone with that that.
I'd a chat with some Google engineers that used to work for Microsoft. One guy was proud of the fact that not one line of code or one bugfix he'd put in over seven years ever made it into a product that shipped. What do you think his morale & efficiency was running at
John