Pingdom Royal

Agreed.

Google shared with us early last year that the revenue split on Adsense is 68% (http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html) - meaning you keep 68% of what they are paid to run the ad and they keep 32%.

You can imagine some very respectable proportion of their income every year is the 1/3 coming from spam/scraped/etc. adsense placements.

Another interesting article on HN just new is that Google's algorithms already seem to know what crap content is and what good content is: http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2011/01/google-probably-knows-what-crap-results-are.html

and my guess is that Google will only roll out improved search results when the cost to the company is great enough to justify the loss of income.

It is a publicly traded company, I don't think Google can just cut out millions of dollars of revenue from their bottom line because they want to not be evil - the shareholders would probably ask for people's heads on platters.

Of course only Google knows the extent of which their income-from-spam is, but I imagine it is significant otherwise they would have solved that problem already as the interest in Duck Duck GO, Blekko and Bing/Yahoo continues to rise/be-discussed-more (Don't know if the ACTUAL usage suggests that people are doing more than just talking or moving over to using different services full time)

Google's compute power is other-worldly. This WP article doesn't do it justice:…

You are sampling outside of Microsoft's market. For eg.

* Instead of GitHub they use Codeplex [0]

* Instead of web servers they sell network servers, a much larger market. Windows still holds 73% of this market, and growing. It is worth $20B a year and is much larger than the web server market [1]

* Outlook is still the most popular mail client in the world (27%)

* Office is Office, one of the most profitable business units in the world

* 550M PC's are sold each year and 85% of them run Windows

* Still 39% of the browser market [3]

* There are Microsoft clients in the Fortune 100-500 that store more data than the entire public internet (taken as being 5 petabytes - most investment banks store data in petabyte scale)

* Visual Studio is not only the most popular IDE, but also the highest selling and grossing [4]

Your data points are based on open source and web servers, which are only a tiny fraction of the total computing and networking market. It is the remainder of that market where Microsoft dominates. I don't think they are even going to pretend to attempt to infiltrate that market, they have a much larger market to defend.

I don't work within the Microsoft ecosystem any longer, but I did for over a decade. I agree with OP that Azure will win, all of my Microsoft development and admin friends are raving about it and moving their clients/organizations onto it.

[0] http://codeplex.org

[1]…

There's nothing trivial about it. Following a book while being taught at a University over a semester is vastly different from what the OP is talking about. For example, he is talking about writing his own PCIe, SATA and USB drivers as well as, well, everything. He is not talking about starting with MINIX and a well-digested book that guides you through the process.

In fact, your suggestion is exactly on point: The OP should pick-up Tannenbaum's book and take a year to implement everything in the book. Why a year? He is a web developer and, I presume, working. It will take more than time to learn what he does not know in order to even do the work. So, let's say a year.

I would suspect that after doing that his view of what he proposed might just be radically different.

For example, wait until he figures out that he has to write drivers for chip-to-chip interfaces such as SPI and I2C. Or that implementing a full USB stack will also require supporting the very legacy interfaces he wants to avoid. Or that writing low-level code to configure and boot devices such as DRAM memory controllers and graphics chips might just be a little tougher than he thought.

There's a reason why Linux has had tens of thousands of contributors and millions of lines of code:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/16/linux-kernel-development-numbers/

...and that's just the kernel.

We covered software-induced disasters in my CS courses. This isn’t standard, which explains a lot about our profession.

My two favorite examples were:

The Therac-25 — it’s just frontend GUI code. Why test it? What could go wrong?

The Siberian gas pipeline explosion of ‘82 — not technically an accident, but it shows the problem with testing untrustworthy code to correctness. It was also the biggest non-nuclear man-made explosion, at least at the time.

The Russians had stolen some pipeline schematics from US companies. The theft was discovered before they stole the control software. Instead of stopping the software from being stolen, US intelligence modified it so an integer would overflow after a year (or two) of operation. The Russian economy would be ruined if the pipeline wasn’t operational in less time than it would take the bug to trigger, so it wouldn’t show up in testing.

When it triggered, it slammed a bunch of valves shut, causing multiple parts of the network to explode at the same time.

The US military’s seismologists detected it, and thought the Russians had detonated a new type of nuclear weapon. The military was going to escalate until the intelligence service told them they were responsible for the blast.

Here’s a decent list of other incidents:

https://royal.pingdom.com/10-historical-software-bugs-with-extreme-consequences/

> Number of users? That's not even sure

As far as I can tell, Slack has an order of magnitude more users. They were at 8m DAU back in May: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/slack-hits-8-million-daily-active-users-with-3-million-paid-users/

IRC was in long-term decline even before Slack: https://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-irc/

So my best guess is that Slack has at least an order of magnitude more users.

But users is not exactly the metric I'm thinking of. It's when people say, "We need some way for us to communicate," Slack is the popular option. Even though I'd rather not use it, I'm in 8 right now. If you look through this thread, you'll find plenty of people concerned about how prominent it is in the open-source world, IRC's home ground.

> IRC runs everywhere and does not need a fat browser or a RAM-and-CPU hungry application to enable "chat".

I get this in theory. But RAM and CPU power are fantastically cheap. Conserving them to get a worse user experience is optimizing for the wrong thing.

> but Slack sucks in many ways

Sure. There are no perfect things. But Slack doesn't have to be perfect. It just had to be better than the competition. And for most people it manifestly is.

I'm a former Googler who managed the deployment of their content distribution network. Outside of the codebase challenges that nostrademons articulated very well, Google has to deal with various big company concerns including shipping and logistics, human resources, legal issues in the many countries it operates in, hardware development, datacenter management, etc. To do this they have many talented people across disciplines. I was constantly looking for people to join our team while still maintaining the high level of ability and innate Googliness that Google looks for in an employee. In many measurements Google is still understaffed. Check out Royal Pingdoms profit per employee. http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/05/17/apple-staff-profit-per-head/. The difference between 2008 to 2010 is incredible and factors in growth in employees. Google still needs to hire... not for world domination but to maintain and improve the services that we love.