Life after Google is about the end of "Big Data" and the Rise of the Blockchain.
I chose to read this book ecause I like to read author's that are historically correct in their predictions and George Gilder has an impressive track record of predicting past technology trends.
THe first part of the book was a bit annoying and slow and I actually almost stopped reading after about 50 pages in. THe Google bashing was just too overwhelming and biased. When people criticize Google for being "free" and monetizing through ads by aggregating and organizing user data I feel liek they are not being realistic about the tradeoffs.
The reality is that no one likes ads, but by Google offering a free product, millions of people all over the world can use their products. Not just privileged people like me, you the reader and George Gilder. who could afford paying a subscription.
I also feel amongst all the companies that collect user data, Google is one of, if not the best company in terms of giving users control over their data and being transparent about how it's used. Google has been around for almost 25 years and you have never heard of them involved in any significant controversies. It's hard to overstate how truly impressive this is.
I personally think that Google and Specifically Google Search and Google Maps is a top 100 invention in the history of humanity. I think that Google Search is a top 10 human invention. Google is one of the best run human institutions in the world.
I end this paragraph, by saying that this is usually what happens when you have a founder-led company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a really amazing capability to think long term, ambitious and be relentlessly user-focused. Now that Larry and Sergey have stepped away from day-to-day management I am curious to see how Sundar Pichai and other Google executives find the balance between thinking long term and what's best for the user with satisfiying short-term wall street and stock market pressures.
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Interesting chapter about How Google capitalized on Moore's Law when bulding their datacenters
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1981 - gigabyte drive: $500,000 and Intel 286 processor ran at 6 megahertz and cost $360,
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2018, a gigabyte costs less than two cents and three-gigahertz processor costs roughly three thousand dollars
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Price of processing dropped 500 times while proces of hard drive dropped 250,000 times
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Most people see this and think that you should fill data center with hard drives, google chose to use lots of fast random access memory chips
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While RAM is 100 times more expensive than disk storage, research shows that users are satisfied with results delivered within twentieth of a second, RAM can be accessed 10,000 times faster than disks, measured by access time, RAM is 100 times cheaper than disk storage, Google is world leader in use of RAM [57]
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So many takeaways from that passage: the fact that Google is a "software" company but they optimized all the way down the stack, from servers, I read that they even design chips now
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Most important takeaway is the realization that the real scarcity is not money, but it's actually time
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"In every era, the winning companies are those that waste what is scarce - as signaled by precipitously declining prices - to save what is scarce" [56]
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Google's ability to take advantage of exponential growth reminds me of Jeff Bezos, looking at exponential growth of internet when starting Amazon (he said: "even Amoeba doesn't grow that fast") and Bill Gates saying something similar when he started Microsoft, related to how Software would be more profitable than Hardware
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Reminds me of another quote: "Andy Giveth and Bill Taketh" or "Intel Giveth and Micosoft Taketh" a joke about how Intel would make faster microchips/computers and Microsoft software would increasingly consume more resources