Question

What are the KEY/MAJOR Factors that led to Google’s amazing success in the same industry that Yahoo had already created? First list all such factors in order of importance; please list at least five (5)KEY/MAJOR Factors and explain all the factors that you just listed in needed details. Thanks!

Answer 1

1. Building fast, and building to last

For Yahoo, the solution came in the form of NetApp  filers, which allowed the company to add server space at a dizzying rate. Almost every service that Yahoo offered ultimately ran on NetApp’s purpose-built storage appliances, which were quick to set up and easy to use, giving Yahoo a fast track to meet market But Google began work on engineering its own software-defined infrastructure, ultimately known as the Google File System, which would function as a platform that could serve a diverse range of use cases for all the services Google would offer as part of its future ecosystem. Instead of using the latest storage appliances as a foundation, the Google File System used commodity servers to support a flexible and resilient architecture that could solve scalability and resiliency issues once and for all, simplifying and accelerating the future rollout of a wide range of web-scale applications, from maps to cloud storage.

2. Scaling Complexity

It took four years of ongoing development, and enormous amounts of engineering resources, before the Google File System reached the point where the company used it for mission-critical operations. Meanwhile, Yahoo had been able to add NetApp filers almost immediately to keep up with growing demands for its services. In the race to dominate the Internet landscape, it appeared Yahoo had pulled far ahead. However, Yahoo’s rapid go-to-market approach also began to show some cracks. As demand continued to expand and diversify, downsides to the appliance-based infrastructure emerged in the form of redundant engineering work, increasingly complex and inefficient environments and finally, mounting vendor costs. When Yahoo added a new service, it needed to re-engineer the NetApp platform for that specific use case.

3. Google understands the problem before even considering the solution

Google built its file system in anticipation of challenges, so that adding new use cases or fixing underlying architecture challenges could be done efficiently. After the purchase of YouTube, for example, Google could simply say, “throw away your back-end and we’ll put you on our platform.” Engineers could make upgrades to the underlying architecture once, and the solution would apply across all of Google’s services.

4. The fresh start

This has been a key aspect of the success of many startups that have displaced legacy enterprises (consider Amazon’s decision to sell infrastructure-as-a-service, which disrupted Comdisco’s previous success outsourcing IT infrastructure on behalf of enterprise clients). It’s also increasingly common at larger companies that don’t want to lose their place to the next young upstart (similar to how Facebook is increasingly building its own infrastructure, from server racks to cameras). Google built a broad platform that extends across the entire web by focusing on simplicity and flexibility, while the complexity of Yahoo’s infrastructure may be the reason it ends up as a small part of another business.

5. Last but not the least, Yahoo management was weak and not so smart. Google was founded by Computer Scientists who know what their teams are doing.