What is $400-a-stock Google upto?

Core Competency of Google:
What would you consider the core competency of Google? It is "search", of course. And what about this diversified successful business that Google operates? They have proven that "they understand the user behavior" - they know how a user would use a particlar application and make it simple to use. That reminds me of Sony and Apple that displayed the same characterstics

Cringley after some thoughts includes "Running clusters of tens and thousands of servers" as another of Google's core competency - which is undisputable. He then extrapolates this with some other dots like dark fibres, Open Office - and predicts how Google can change the Internet. The article, very well articulated, is a good read:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html

I liked how google can create a local cache and use their page-rank algorithm. The result is that using internet would be as simple as clicking on your TV or iPoD

Resource Virtualization:

This article also reminds me of John's remarks about resource virtualization over the internet: the user would not know or not care if the CPU or memory is on the device or somewhere reachable within the internet. Google is leading the world one step closer

Basics on Google Existing Datacenters:

I found this interesting link on their existing 64 datacenters. This starts by explaining datacenter in a very lame by comparing with library. This was an interesting and easy explanation that I had never thought or come across before (I have helped built datacenters for some of the big companies, so the easy meaning was a good read):

http://www.mcdar.net/about-google-datacenters.htm

The author also describes all the 64 ip-addresses and the methods to do that. It seems lot of people watch this closely and there are terms like "Google Dance" widely available