| You are forgetting a bit, I worked in some of the large datacenters where both Google and Yahoo had cages. 1) Google copied the hotmail model of strapping commodity PC components to cheap boards and building software to deal with complexity. 2) Yahoo had a much larger cage, filled with very very expensive and large DEC machines, with one poor guy sitting in a desk in there almost full time rebooting the systems etc....I hope he has any hearing left today. 3) Just right before the .com crash, I was in a cage next to Google's racking dozens of brand new Netra T1s, which were pretty slow and expensive...that company I was working for died in the crash. Look at Google's web page: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/google-1999 Compare that to Yahoo: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/yahoo-in-1999 Or the company they originaly tried to sell google to Excite: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/excite-2001 Google grew to be profitable because they controlled costs, invested in software vs service contracts and enterprise gear, had a simple non-intrusive text based ad model etc... Most of what you mention above was well after that model focused on users and thrift allowed them to scale and is survivorship bias. Internal incentives that directed capitol expenditures to meet the mission vs protect peoples back was absolutely a related to their survival. Even though it was a metasearch, my personal preference was SavvySearch until it was bought and killed or what ever that story way. OpenAI is far more like Yahoo than Google. |
I opted for a fanless graphics board, for just that reason.