This wired article titled If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet, is an old one – from 5 years ago, but it is still an inspirational read. So many things lined up for Google, to be where they are today.
I still get goose bumps reading that article – but then I am a geek, if that wasn’t obvious. Whilst, grid computing with GFS, MapReduce, Hadoop, are still very much relevant and great (and most others still trying to use and understand it); Dynamo (from Amazon) and BigTable lead to NoSQL which is great and still worth spending a lot of time learning, playing, and, experimenting – I would love to hear on what they are doing now with Colossus (think of that as GFS vNext), Caffeine and, Spanner.
7 years is an eternity and who knows what is cooking? And of course what are both Microsoft and Amazon doing to compete around this. How can you not continue to be excited the world we are living in? 🙂