Google has proved to be a great idea. The idea Google had 14 years ago was to build a more versatile search engine. Today, its searches are completed with amazing speed; the primary impact is a rapid search through massive amounts of data, which ultimately improves our ability to access information that exists on the Internet. If we were allowed to peek at the technology underpinnings, the details of which are highly guarded trade secrets, we would find tens of thousands of servers running highly customized software. Regarding the business model, the idea is based on organizing faster ways to locate and access everyone else’s content, free of charge. Google claims 400 million different people do billions of searches every day. They expanded to offer applications and hundreds of other services free, and occasionally charge for certain offerings or extensions to free offerings.
Facebook, another great idea, created a more versatile social network in 2004 and gave people who know each other the ability to connect, communicate, and share personal information and messages. Today, Facebook has approximately 750 million members and counting. Each of these members has formed his or her own subnetwork with other people who are part of the Facebook user community. Facebook recently put an Application Programming Interface (API) on its network that has attracted 1 million application developers to write programs that allow people in this community to interact in new ways. Their success is based on giving the service away for free.
Both Google and Facebook borrowed a commonly used approach to create revenue; namely, to attract eyeballs to the site and then sell space to advertisers. Perhaps the greatest innovation behind Internet advertising in general was the idea to vary the ad content dynamically based on the context of what the user is doing.
Both Google and Facebook built upon a great idea that Tim Berners-Lee had 20 years ago to add hyperlinks to make the Internet more versatile, more user-friendly, and ultimately, more commerce-friendly. Berners-Lee is the brains behind Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and was subsequently credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW). It’s fascinating that no one owns the WWW, yet it connects 1 billion users that share a global network comprised of millions of different servers. Of course, the Internet is more than just the WWW; it has developed into an ecosystem that has birthed commerce in new ways that have dramatically lowered the cost of entry for start-ups, ultimately changing the rules of business. The Internet has become so integral to commerce and communications that the more a company or a country uses it, the more vulnerable they become to cyberwarfare. IBM estimates that this year the Internet will exceed 1 trillion devices connected.
Another great idea was to build a general purpose computer, an idea that has allowed the mainframe to become and remain the backbone of the world’s economy for 50 years. The largest companies of the world, spanning every industry and including governments, still rely on mainframes to complete billions of mission-critical business transactions every second of every day. The mainframe’s design has evolved over several decades to support multiple architectures and operating systems concurrently and to load balance while running on autopilot. It provides bulletproof security and is malwareproof. The current version is designed to support more than 13,000 virtual machines per server and more than 100,000 virtual machines in a cluster (ensemble). Another great idea was to maintain upward compatibility. Today, this approach protects the customer's investment in an application like no other server platform. Micro Focus reports there still are more than 200 billion lines of COBOL in operation globally, processing more than 30 billion transactions per day.
Someone I worked with once put forth an idea for a quick and affordable way to assess the relative value of technologies—just forecast what the impact would be if one day the technology simply went away.
Hmmmm ... If Google went away, 400 million customers would immediately seek out Google’s competitors, and I suspect all 200 million users of Google mail (Gmail) would be kicking themselves for not having a backup for their email account. If Facebook went away, all the less successful social networks would quickly fill the void; in the meantime, phone calls and face-to-face encounters between friends would increase.
If mainframes shut down, the global economy would come to a screeching halt, so don’t get me started on dumb ideas ...
