[May 31, 2020] – For Google and Amazon, the early days after the Dot.Com Bubble in the young 2000s somewhat resembled the first days of manned flight.
Great minds were at work, but there was chewing gum and chicken wire too – or, in the case of Google and Amazon, Velcro, commodity disk drives and bug-swatting systems-level engineering.
The Dot.com Bubble is distant now, as we encounter a potentially worse financial crisis a’ brewing. So, a look back at these winning company’s original technical maneuverings may be in order.
Today, peering into the future tense, you are pretty safe in proposing there will be consolidation, mergers and acquisitions ahead for heated tech fields such as AI, machine learning and IoT. But, while the big get bigger, new stars emerge, as Google, Amazon and refocused editions of Apple and Microsoft proved in the wake of financial crisis in 2000 and 2008.
This reporter got a view into the early days of “fast, reliable and cheap” deployments at Usenix in Boston in June 2004. At a keynote there, Rob Pike described a Google application development mentality that led the company to take on the responsibility for developing its own fault tolerance. That report sheds light on the dawn of cloud computing, and is presented here: Velcro: Young Google’s sticky little secret. – Jack Vaughan