Google's Journey

Interesting account of Google's journey to IPO. Reflects on the ideology of its founders and also some interesting events and turning points in the history of the _hot_ company. Focusses too much on the CEO's role in the company tho.

Here are come quotes from the article:
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A quote from on of the VC's: “If you like the founders and you like the technology, price doesn’t matter.”
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The typical CEO's say: “Hey, some people just want to paddle across the Atlantic Ocean in a rubber raft,” Doerr recalls Bezos replying. “That’s fine for them. The question is whether you want to put up with it.”
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“Most young people starting companies are afraid,” says Joe Kraus, who at 21 was a founder of Excite. “They’re afraid of failing. Afraid of getting it wrong. Afraid of missing their chance. Afraid, especially, of saying no to John Doerr. But these guys weren’t afraid.”
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“I did not understand when I came to the company how broad Larry and Sergey’s vision was,” Schmidt says. “It took me six months of talking to them to really understand it. I remember sitting with Larry, saying, ‘Tell me again what our strategy is,’ and writing it down.”
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There was the time the boys suggested having Google enter the business of low-cost space launchings. And the time Larry reportedly tried to ban telephones from a new Google office building.
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....... , “Don’t be evil” the corporate motto. (Asked later what the slogan meant, Schmidt would say, “Evil is what Sergey says is evil.”)
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Schmidt now looks back fondly on the genesis of the relationship. “Our roles evolved quickly,” he says. “Sergey is the master dealmaker, Larry is the deep technologist, and I make the trains run on time.”
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John Battelle, author of a forthcoming book on the company, observes, “I’m not saying that Microsoft—or AOL, or Yahoo—can’t prosper, or even ‘win’ in the long term. But crush Google à la Netscape? No friggin’ way. The only thing that can kill Google is Google itself.”
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But if the history of the technology industry teaches us anything, it’s that no one is ever that lucky—at least, not for long....... When crisis eventually comes to Google— and it will—the company’s fate will depend on whether they have absorbed a handful of lessons that apply as much to life as they do to business: Adulthood happens. You can’t make all your own rules. And everyone [screws] up.

Ajax - the science behind those "cool" webapps

Have you noticed the "coolness" about the new web applications like Gmail, Google Suggest, Google Maps etc? That is how responsive they are? Well its all because of the new trend called Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript + X(HT)ML). Although the technology has beed around for ages but the tools (browsers, API's, libraries etc.) have recently matured enough to take the challenge.

This site descibes the technologies involved:

Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

JSON-RPC-Java is a related Java library for the this magic and here is the slashdot article.

Google Maps wow-ness

Google Maps is one of the coollest web application i have seen in some time. Go see it to believe it.



Here is the disection of the under-the-hood stuff and here is the related slashdot story.

First picture published on the internet

http://musiclub.web.cern.ch/MusiClub/bands/cernettes/firstband.html



... by Tim Berners Lee himself.

[quote]

Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web". I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim's now famous "info.cern.ch". How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!"

Silvano de Gennaro

[/quote]

What it takes to do stuff right

http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.html

Incredible article (although pretty old) about how the software inside the space craft works. This gives an insight into how the people writing the code for those giant complicated beasts work. They go at that code base with an attitude that makes the average paranoid look happy-go-lucky. In fact, they approach software engineering kind of like other engineers do -- as if lives depended on it. It's old, it's slow, and it works.

Excerpt:

But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

Courtesy: a Slashdot.org post