How good is ‘Google Sites’ as a web hosting platform? For my contribution to the Computer Measurement Group’s (CMG) yearly conference (CMG Las Vegas 2012) I am reviewing a number of webhosting options. One of the basic options is ‘Google Sites’, which is a content management system (CMS) with hosting and a content distribution network, […]
Google just published its Q3 financial results. You can read it yourself at http://investor.google.com/earnings/2010/Q3_google_earnings.html So, what is Google spending on IT, and how much servers would that buy? This is one of their best kept secrets. I looked at that earlier. Let’s have a new look. Some quotes: Other cost of revenues, which is comprised primarily […]
Gmail was down a while. Google describes how it happened. In essence, a mechanism designed to throttle load on heavily used parts of the infrastructure reduced total capacity. If demand is then not reduced this leads to congestion, similar to what happens in a traffic jam. One way for gmail to reduce demand is to […]
The ‘cloud’ stands for a worldwide infrastructure of computers that can deliver applications and content to any place on the Internet. Early examples of clouds are content distribution networks (CDN), which can serve web content from a worldwide distributed network of servers. Because the servers are closer to the user the user will see quicker […]
Google App Engine is an infrastructure to deliver applications through Google’s cloud. You can drop applications written in Python in it, and let Google do the hosting. I am setting up a business based on this (GriddleJuiz). So the first obvious questions are: where is the cloud, and does it perform? With the help of […]
In my previous post I discussed the technical qualities of Google’s new browser, Chrome. On a strategic business level, Chrome is the kick-off for a new battle for platform dominance. How can substituting one piece of free software (the browser) for another have such business impact? To understand that, you will have to look at […]
Google’s new browser, Chrome, appears to be a major improvement not so much for its functionality but for its stability. In software land, version 2 of something indicates the first serious incorporation of user feedback. In this way, Web 2.0 addressed user needs for more interactivity and multi-user, multi-site collaboration. In software land, version 2.0 […]
Computers are terribly reliable, in general. Today’s computers execute millions of instructions each second, with an error rate that is inconceivable in other technologies. Yet, if you have hundreds of thousands of machines, you do need to take care of failures. A Cnet article elaborates on the Google situation (a Google cluster has several thousands […]
Just one second delay in delivering a web page can make a devastating impact on your online business. Consider this: an item on an online auction site is easily viewed 300 times. This means that a user in search of particular item could therefore view 300 items before making a choice. If each of these […]
The other day I wrote about Google’s technology cost, leading to an estimate of 0.5 dollarcents per delivered search result. There appeared to be a real contrast with the numbers Jim Gray was coming up with from his experience with the Terraserver. I interviewed him to dive deeper into these numbers and their composition. According […]
