Google as Xerox PARC?
This wired article titled If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet , is an old one - from 5 years ago, but it is still an inspirational read. So many things lined up for Google, to be where they are today. I still get goose bumps reading that article - but then I am a geek, if that wasn’t obvious. Whilst, grid computing with GFS, MapReduce, Hadoop, are still very much relevant and great (and most others still trying to use and understand it); Dynamo (from Amazon) and BigTable lead to NoSQL which is great and still worth spending a lot of time learning, playing, and, experimenting - I would love to hear on what they are doing now with Colossus (think of that as GFS vNext), Caffeine and, Spanner ....