Enterprise Google – Transformational Computing Platform

(Via CMSWatch) Steve Arnold has come out with the book titled, Google Trends captured in a well written book -The Google Legacy. "The Googolplex” - as he writes is much more. New, radical and overlooked, Google is this era's transformational computing platform and could be about to unseat Microsoft from its throne. Google is not just about search: search is merely one application you can load on its processor. Massively parallelized and distributed, its processing capability can be expanded indefinitely. As a virtual system or network utility, the user simply faces no need for backup or setup or restore. Although Google has been releasing a series of separate application programs, the company is starting to assemble the mosaic pieces into a bigger picture.Its future will be about leveraging its innovative hardware/software infrastructure. In so doing, just as Microsoft replaced IBM, Google promises to replace Microsoft as Network Computing comes of age. Part of the book is available as a free download. Google's carefully customized and highly-tuned infrastructure stack - hardware, OS, web tools, network, etc. - bodes well for developing additional applications. Google's approach to technology is eclectic and in many ways represents a building block approach to large scale systems. Arnold highlights that the structure of Google's data centers and the messages passed to and fro is in many ways a variant of Grid computing and argues that there is no way to disaggregate software and hardware engineering while capturing details about Google. If Google expands its footprint in the enterprise space - e.g., to develop content management or authoring tools - it will come as a hosted service or (like its enterprise search product) an appliance. An extremely well analysed and brilliantly presented book - must read for all interested.