The New York Times is running a breathless story about how
Google assembles the majority of the hardware it uses and deploys at such a large scale, that Google may be ‘the world’s fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M
Users as innovators? Who would have thunk it? Actually Eric von Hippel, my thesis advisor, was the first scholar to point out that a majority of the functionally novel innovations arrive from users. His books “The Source of Innovation” and “Democratizing Innovation” (both available as free downloads) outline the basic thesis of users as innovators and and provide empirical data to show this effect.
NanoSummary: Users can be innovators because they directly experience the use environment with existing products and find them to be lacking in critical functionality. The decision then is to build or buy. Often times the buy option is simply not there because manufacturers do not experience the same use environment and it takes a long time for them to recognize the “need.” Many advanced users cannot wait for the manufacturers to build something they do not understand or for marketing departments to agree that their need can serve the mass market. Thus they innovate. Its really that simple.
Some of the user innovations at work at Google:
Mr. Page designed the initial Google servers, with the assumption that parts would fail on a regular basis. At first he tried to simplify assembly — and reduce the presumed repair time — by not fastening components to the servers at all but simply laying them on a bed of cork. This proved to be unstable, and so parts were connected with Velcro.
“Nobody builds servers as unreliably as we do,” Mr. Hölzle said in a speech last year at CERN, the Swiss particle physics institute. Google is reducing cost while maintaining performance by shifting the burden of reliability from hardware to software — individual hardware components can fail, but software automatically shifts the local task and the data to other machines.
For example, Google designed a software system it calls the Google File System that keeps copies of data in several places so Google does not have to worry when one of its cheap servers fails. This approach also means that it does not have to make regular backup copies of its data as other companies do.
Another system, called the Google Work Queue, allows a big pool of servers to be assigned to various tasks as needed and reassigned to other projects later. This concept, called “virtualization,” has become a trend among large data center operators, which also want to reduce the expense of having separate servers dedicated to each system. But most companies buy commercial software to track which computers are doing what, a complex process.
Google, with its huge computing infrastructure (last I heard it was > 500,000 servers) and the ginormous amounts of hits per days, is experiencing problems that no common server farm provider or manufacturer of software or hardware is facing. Thus the company has to innovate itself and solve those problems or fall behind. Its clear that Google has decided to innovate. A radical example in the article:
Beyond servers, there are signs that Google is now designing its own microchips. The company has hired many of the engineers responsible for the Digital Equipment Corporation’s well-regarded Alpha chip.
“Google’s next step is to build high-performance silicon,” said Mark Stahlman, an independent technology analyst.
Mr. Hölzle said Google had considered custom semiconductor design, but he declined to say if the company had built any. He said that, in general, Google did not want to build anything from scratch if it could buy something that was just as good.
But he added that Google continued to believe that its approach to designing its own cheap and fast computer networks gave it an edge.
“Having lots of relatively unreliable machines and turning them into a reliable service is a hard problem,” Mr. Hölzle said. “That is what we have been doing for a while.”
Viva user innovation!
Do check out this site that I run with Eric von Hippel on the scholarly aspects of user innovation.
