[native_samples]

I worked on Google Earth for a while, some years ago. It doesn't really make sense to talk about it in the way the article (and presumably movie) does. There are lots of "algorithms" in Google Earth which are critical to its operation.

Probably the biggest unsung algorithmic hero of GE is the image processing and serving pipeline. The actual client tech itself was largely worked out by the time Keyhole was bought (hence the high age of this lawsuit), and the biggest upgrades to the client came mostly in the form of optimizations and support for new features like 3D buildings. What wasn't visible was the enormous amount of work in the infrastructure required to actually process and serve the whole globe's worth of imagery. At the time, Keyhole's processing and serving pipeline just didn't scale to the amount of imagery actually available for purchase. That's no knock on their engineering skills: imagery is expensive and given their business model there simply wasn't a need to process all the imagery that existed. But once Google bought them, they were given a blank cheque and told to quite simply acquire it all. The infrastructure of the time (MapReduce, BigTable etc) were a perfect fit for this problem and allowed a rapid drain of the imagery backlog that had by then accumulated. Over time more and more of the calculations done to the raw sensor data (like ortho-rectification) were pulled in house for cost reasons and to allow further scaling - the satellite imagery providers could easily become CPU bottlenecked themselves.

This sort of article/movie seems ultimately to have some sort of ideological driver, given that its opening thesis is "for every winner, there are lots of losers; the people who blazed the trail for the others to ruthlessly make billions from their efforts". I mean, that's not true is it? This blasé statement implies the tech industry is negative-sum but it isn't even zero sum, it's positive sum: the whole reason it's successful is that it's a massive creator of wealth. The assumption that the big winners in the tech industry got there simply by aggressively stealing everything is so far from reality it surely makes the article closer to propaganda than anything else.

[unixhero]

You ought to watch the actual mini series. Thanks for your otherwise insightful comment.

[lotsofpulp]

Thanks for the additional context!