In the Plex

“My job was to get in the car, get on a plane, go find data centers.”

* Google, a company that once focused on building Internet Software, began building a program that would lead it to construct more than a dozen billion-dollar facilities over the next few years.

* Chris Sacca was in charge of finding sites where Google could build its centers.

* In 2004, Google hid the company’s success so Microsoft would not know how big search was.

* On February 16, 2005, Google bought the land for $1.87M (30 acres in Les Dalles, Oregon and Googles Data center was on the map.

* Google has more than 100,000 servers in the Les Dalles location to run their 50,000 computers.

* Google also built data centers in Atlanta Georgia, Goose Creek, South Carolina and Moncks Corner North Carolina. They also wanted to be international so they built in Belgium.

* Googles team came up with MapReduce; which allowed programmers to control a massive number of machines and allowed for shared content.

* MapReduce empowered a single programmer to efficiently make use of a lot of information. This program was the building blocks of Googles Cloud.

“They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful.”

* In the very beginning, Google did not want to draw in the attention of Microsoft, which was the world’s biggest software company.

* Microsoft’s revenues were made up of two cash cows that were both monopolies: Windows Operating System and Microsoft Office.

* Microsoft felt threatened by Google that they would apply their internet-centric approach to attack Microsoft Office.

* Google’s strategy team was interested in the applications area in the software industry and saw that there was a need for product management, which is the approach they took into entering the market.

* Google’s strategy started out with them buying small companies that produced web-based applications such as JotSpot (which is a creator of collaborative wiki-style...