All this has EVER been is a way to extort more yearly fees from every corporation on the planet.

That's what our economy is based on now. It is well known to be the best way to make money, since you don't have to do anything in return. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking

Think of it as Mafia 2.0.

You're right about one thing, the systems in 1998 didn't look like GoolgeFS. They looked like what GoogleFS is becoming now that they are actually learning how to do it. Google very clearly did not know which constraints mattered, but now they seem to be aimed towards the right track now.

Oh, and you'll find the commercial world is vastly less impressed by a PhD then you think. Skills are all that matter. A PhD is like a shortwave radio - only other people with a shortwave care, and everyone else thinks you're a little nuts :)

Not really, it's IT done by not letting anyone over 30 or with any experience into the room. Every single issue they had to learn and fix mentioned in the article is quite literally standard textbook stuff in distributed systems, and has been for over 40 years. The failure model, the huge chunk sized, the single master problems... etc. Nobody who had taken even one decent class would have ever considered the original design viable.

They really should just stick to buying their tech pre-made like everything else Google is known for - acquisitions. Other companies are willing to hire experienced people. You know, those old lazy bastards that only work 40 hours a week because they have families, cost way too much to provide health insurance to, but get things done 5x as fast because they have done it before :)

Which is why I used the term "in-house". The companies are not people thread is down the hall.

Webmail has been around a lot longer then Google.

Sadly, your statement was never true. Everything you think of as from Google was bought except the original Pagerank (obsoleted about a week after they started using it), which is licensed from Stanford. And AdSense, responsible for 99.9999% of their revenues, feeding the rest of the company, was bought and started from work at Brown University.

Please provide evidence for anything you think Google invented in-house.

Why are people listed by where they work their day job, as if that has anything to do with it?

Oh, so you've seen the other 100 .com startups that tried EXACTLY this business plan then :)

It's touchy now.

But the second you take money from them, you're screwed.

Is there anything in history safe from Google claiming credit for it?

Pretty soon it will be Google Wheel(tm) and Google Fire(tm)

White high-reflectivity paint.

It's Google! They invented everything, air, fire, water, they even created people! All hail the Google overlords!

(but seriously, that idea is old, almost as old as map-reduce, which means patentable in the US)

It's known as the 3rd shift, and it's not 100 of 500, it's more like 1/3 (absolute minimum if you have something made in China) to 2/3 of all production.

Perfectly legal (there) and perfectly "real" goods. Welcome to China.

Even funnier, they think FTC > CIA and NSA, the government agencies working with Google (that's their job, we the taxpayers pay them to watch Google)

To be fair, this is much more then "somewhat remarkable" for any academic discipline.