But could you please articulate a little more clearly the basic point you are trying to convey? I sort of feel like I lack the latitude/mobility to make use of this wonderful new fountain of information.

Plus, the middle and the left of the bell curve will never take advantage of any of this.

Finally, I agree that this is a rising tide that you describe, but it's not all good. Why do we have to settle for programming web apps in a deformed and mutant language like Javascript, which has spread, cancer-like, through a formatting markup language (HTML)?

I know, not as clear as I would like to be, however I am restricted on what I can and cannot say due to various disclosure agreements.

I just added a link to the New York Times photo of the "columbia river monster"

It should provide you with all you need for the same search.

Well, thanks for the pointers, but from my obvious location well to the left of the hump on the bell curve, I can't see anything of interest.

I saw that New York Times article was via Reddit last year.

Is this evidence that the "G: Drive" will be rolled out? With diskless Andriod appliances as the front-ends? Is this where they are building Orson Scott Card's killer left wing robots?

Think about it like this. If I came to you in 1992 and said that in 10 years time, the world would recieve the preponderance of its daily information from something called "the internet" or if I came to you in 1984 and said that very soon the bulk of corporate information processing would be done on personal computers, based on what you knew then what would you have said?

And based on what you know now? You know now that engineering smarts and clarily dont add up to much against raw economics. I say this as a former 370 assembler and CICS programmer.

Heres the future that the book and that article point to: in 10 years time, the bulk of corporate and personal computing will be performed in buildings like those seen in that article. In 1998, people I work with - smart folks all, said that no company would ever run their corporate ERP apps on the internet. They argued that client/server was the superior way to go.

They were wrong. In the end it wasnt about engineering elegance, it was about simple good old fashioned economics that pushed the new wave which just hit with the advent of the successful IPO of salesforce.com.

In that picture I referred to, you see two of six massive data centers powered by a hydroelectic source. Someone wiser than myself recently said a few years ago that the cost of electricty will soon overwhelm any hardware improvements for processing and as such, electricty - specifically cheap electricity will drive the game. Its in that context that you can truly evaluate this site.

This site is not built to make your search engine faster, it is built to host your corporate and personal computing needs on the web, the sort of thing that you used to have a local IT staff and data center for.

The economics of that site provide that particular vendor with a price competition that will be hard to compete against - unless of course, you are one of the two other vendors who are upstream on the Columbia - yahoo and microsoft.

Another wise man recently said " there are only 5 computers in the world - Microsoft, Google, Yahoo eBay, Amazon.com and Salesforce.com". When I heard that, I laughed, but frankly Im not laughing anymore because I read Mr. Carrs book.

> Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction.

I'll be more impressed when they figure out that fewer but more accurate results are the actual goal.

I don't need information on Fordham university when I type "Ford"... and I do expect "Ford Motor Corporation" to be on the first page

I haven't tested that above example, but it's the sort of problem I've always found with Google -- you get 97,000 entries 98% of which appear to have no logical correlation with what you even typed, much less what you wanted. The google engine appears to do a positively lousy job of even sorting by "all terms" vs. a single term. If I type in "Olympic Speedskating Records" I'm just as likely to find a link to "Olympic Sporting Goods" on the first page as I am to find a link to Amazon Music. And that's flat-out ridiculous.

It pisses me off, and it's one of the chief reasons I always use a meta-engine like Dogpile or Ask and not Google.

I wish someone with a clue and money would go hunt down the creators of Infind, a now-defunct search engine which did a literally spectacular job of finding "what you want" as opposed to "something vaguely related to what you want". Infind was a casualty of the d-c-bust ca. 2002. If you type "Ford" on their webpage, you actually got Ford Motor Corporation on the first page -- and I can't recall any time I'd even not gotten exactly the thing I was looking for on the first or second page.

That, of course, is criticism of Google as a straight-up search engine.

There are plenty of other complaints to be made about them as a company as well as a search engine.

They believe, for example, that they ought to be able to censor your web results based on their political views:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03260.html
That's specifically about rejecting ad content -- which, on the surface, seems reasonable -- but the company in question isn't being rejected because of the ad content, it's because the company ALSO sells something they object to. The ad content is not at issue.

Before you complain about what Google does or does not do, it's best to test your own complaints. I typed in "Ford" and got Ford Motor Company etc. on first page. I typed in "Olympic Speedskating Records" and got Olympic Skating Records all on first page with no Amazon Music. I also typed in Firearms and got pages of firearm retailers not ads but each website sells firearms.

I don't doubt that Google has problems with their search results but they tend to fix those problems a lot faster than other BIG companies because Google seems to have a shorter approval chain for changes. My 2 cents.

Frank

What a wonderful book. I've both alerted by own investment advisor and convinced myself that my own small business will move more quickly and outsource all of our IT needs. We already do it now with a software app that's mission critical to our business. Both data and the software app are remote hosted. I only learned about this application approach by accident when our sales rep for the product only casually mentioned it. Go figure. We presently have a server/client approach to everything else but that will change very soon. This is an area I want to be part of the early adopters.

Go get thee an Amazon AWS account and run a few things in the public directory. You can get up and running in about an hour, if you are technically savvy. One afternoon of playing will give you a good solid insight to the near future of computing.

Thanks

I will.

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