[via Jeremy Zawodny]

A great article from Rich Skrenta about the “real” competitive advantage Google is building with its very cheap but incredibly powerful hardware platform. A very interesting analysis and point of view!

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world’s top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world’s biggest computer and most advanced operating system?