[via nytimes.com]

Gosh , if these figures are true… Wow, we are talking about 450’000 servers around the world… Impressive.

Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky. […]

Google remains far ahead in the global data-center race, and the scale of its complex here is evidence of its extraordinary ambition.

Even before the Oregon center comes online, Google has lashed together a global network of computers – known in the industry as the Googleplex – that is a singular achievement.[…]

The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as remarkable as its size. In March 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web pages daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft researcher granted anonymity to talk about a detailed tour he was given at one of Google’s Silicon Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000.

Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and a big computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. Connecting these centers is a high-capacity fiber optic network that the company has assembled over the last few years. […]

Microsoft’s Internet computing effort is currently based on 200,000 servers, and the company expects that number to grow to 800,000 by 2011 under its most aggressive forecast, according to a company document.

[via InformationWeek]

Some very interesting insights from Charles Babcock about the difference between developpers from the open source community and normal Corporate programmers. This article also tries to explain why companies, although they are using massively open source components, are not contributing back to the open source community.

Status quo

[…] This spirit of volunteerism is alive and well in the world of open source software. Thousands of people donate their time and expertise to the benefit of all. But not everyone is giving as much as they’re getting. Large companies, those with the greatest wherewithal to help, are surprisingly minor players in the roll-up-your-sleeves work of open source development.

Big companies are “great consumers of open source. They’re very good at pushing the limits of what open source code can do,” says Carl Drisko, leader of the data center consulting practice at Novell, which distributes SUSE Linux. But when it comes to pounding out code, Drisko says, “they don’t have a lot of people contributing back.” […]

More than 10,000 people have made contributions to Linux alone in the past 10 years. […]

More than 100,000 projects are under way on the SourceForge.net open source site, ranging from the Stellarium desktop planetarium to the Pentaho business intelligence system. […]

But business participation is the exception rather than the rule. The Open Source Development Lab, one of the leading groups behind Linux, has seen its membership triple to 86 organizations over the past two years. All but 8% of those members come from companies that sell technology or from educational institutions. Among the exceptions are Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, and Google.[…]

Only a fraction of open source software is written by people paid to write it, usually programmers working for companies that have a direct interest in a project. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems all sponsor such programmers. But they’re a tiny minority. Out of 250 contributors to the PostgreSQL open source database, only seven are paid for that work. The Subversion project had about 200 contributors last year, and only 10 were paid to work on the software. […]

Some factors to explain the “non-participation”

But contributions from businesses are small, partly because of a cultural divide between the open source crowd and corporate software developers, says Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server project and CTO at software company CollabNet. In contrast to the bottom line business world, Behlendorf says, open source developers exhibit a “willingness to challenge authority, the passion to work on an interesting problem well past the end of the workday, and the time and space to be able to build the right solution to a problem rather than just the most expedient.”

That highlights one reason some companies aren’t contributing to open source: They want to maintain rights to the software they develop, something they must give up under the General Public License that governs the use and distribution of much open source. Any new twist they might bring to an open source application would become available to competitors.

Workload is a factor, too. Managers reason that if their IT staffers have time to contribute to an open source project, they don’t have enough “real” work to do.

Conclusion

Open source programmers make their mark “with thoroughness, tenacity, a desire to solve interesting problems, an ability to take criticism, and they communicate well,” Momjian says. While such attributes are common in the business world, they don’t necessarily exist in the right blend to survive the rigors of an open source project. “Eighty percent of corporate developers won’t have the skills,” he asserts. Hard criticism, for sure. But the onus is on corporate America to prove him wrong.

The key ingredient is passion. Open source contributors have to become “emotionally involved, committed,” Momjian says, but they can’t expect much in return. The goals of the project are more important than the goals of individuals or companies.

Conflicting interests mean the coding will be left to others.[…]

You perhaps remember (post), Nick and myself were in Moscow, Russia last November for the first International Life & Pension conference.

An article about this conference was published in a Russian newspaper called The Insurer. Have a look, specially p19!

The Insurer – Breeders of Life (p14-19)

Technological aspects of life insurance were discussed broadly, then in considerable detail. The ins and outs of multichannel distribution were covered by Didier Beck, CEO of e-Center Solutions, Helvetia Patria Group, Switzerland and his colleague Nick Stefania.

Second evening at a Venecian Palazzo

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[via Knowledge@Wharton]

Some thoughts about some strategic moves by Microsoft.

Indeed, Microsoft is a company in transition, and investors, customers and the entire technology industry would be wise to pay attention. At issue is whether Microsoft has grown too big to be nimble enough to compete with its long list of rivals on many fronts: Google in Internet search and advertising, Sony in video games with the launch of its Playstation 3 on November 17, Linux inside the corporation, and Apple Computer in digital media, to name just a few. […]

Kaplan, however, argues that Microsoft should be experimenting with new markets and that even a failure isn’t a waste of money. “A big company like Microsoft should be running a lot of (potentially conflicting) experiments. Only some will work out. Creativity must almost by definition involve failed experiments. That’s why creative destruction is the essential dynamic of the marketplace.” […]

Microsoft is worth $236 billion as of May 12. If a startup becomes a company with $2 billion in annual revenue, it is considered a success. Microsoft would need more than 100 successful business launches just to keep its current market capitalization if the Windows and Office franchise were eroded. “There’s nothing you can do to be offensive when you are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars,” says Metrick. “All of these new ventures are small potatoes if you lose Windows and Office.” […]

Meds is the great last album from Placebo. Yesterday, it was annouced that Placebo will bring a concert in Zurich, Switzerland on October 6, 2006. This time, I have managed to buy two tickets, one for Laurent and one for myself.

I am sure, this will be a great experience ;-)

It seems that enough of you have crossed their fingers to help us :-) The migration went well during the week-end, the System Acceptance Test was ok for all the Application Owners. And this infrastructure is … FAST (factor 3 to 4, based on the first statistics).

A lot of our 12’000 users wanted to test the new infrastructure, so that it seems that we had one of our highest load of the history of the platform. As proof-of-the-pudding, not bad!

More to come till the end of this week and the end of the first stabilization phase.

First evening at the restaurant Cipriani

First wonderful evening at the restaurant Locanda Cipriani. This special restaurant is situed on the Torcello island at the northern end of the Venetian lagoon.

Me eating….fish :-)

[via Seth Godin]

Some interesting points from Seth.

I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters. I’m already itching to rewrite my traffic post below. So, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I’d have to choose the latter.

So, bloggers who like comments, blog on. Commenters, feel free. But not here. Sorry.

[via Jeff]

As one of our marketing consultants, Richard Currier, has always told our portfolio companies, “you market the vision, and sell the product.” If you get too locked into talking about a product, then your partner or customer gets stuck into thinking about who else does this and why are you different. Getting into a feature/function battle in the first meeting is not a great way to start. Sure enough, our prospective partner started naming several companies asking us how we differed from them. If you start with a vision first and clearly talk about your view of the market in the future and how your product evolves from where it is today to a roadmap of the future, then it is easier to differentiate your company and bring the discussion to a higher level.