Interested to hear your assessment of the NFAIS attendees (I’m not so surprised at that – they aren’t techie types generally). You seem to think that it is a weakness of Google that they don’t shout about their clear strengths in Hardware/Software. I have thought for a long time now that this has been a very deliberate approach. When Marissa Mayer (if memory serves) commented in an article about how the 401 phone service (I’m in the UK, but that’s directory services right?) was really about getting enough data to do voice recognition for search based activities, I thought “Hello, these people are operating on a different level to everyone else.”

Question – would Googles powers with data, scare people if they understood it? I think the answer there could all too easily be Yes. That would be bad for shareholder value as scared people probably ring their politicians and ask for things to be done about it.

There are now lots of venture funded startups either trumpeting or using knock offs of Google’s infrastructure assets (i.e. Hadoop) so it seems crazy to hear someone argue that they haven’t done a great job of getting the word out.

Unfortunately, the Register article did not do a very good job of covering Microsoft’s new and substantial efforts at building Google-like distributed primitives like Azure, SSDS, and Axum.