I never knew

In 2007 I wrote a quick post about infrastructure opportunities.

I’ve also wondered previously about opportunities with cheap electricity, seems The Google and other huge server farms are spending more on electricity than on hardware, hello Hydro Québec joint venture?

Found this in September 2011:

The facility will run on geothermal and hydroelectric power – in Iceland, all electricity is from renewable energy sources. The project was commissioned by the UK start-up Verne Global, itself a data hosting company, which plans to use Iceland’s cheap power to undercut rival European offerings.
—World’s first zero-carbon data centre to be built in Iceland

And then this just last week:

The enormous server farm facility in Luleå, northern Sweden, to be announced officially on Thursday morning, is the first time that the social networking giant has chosen to locate a server farm outside the US.
“The climate will allow them to just use only air for cooling the servers,” said Mats Engman, chief executive of the Aurorum Science Park, which is leading the push to turn the city into a ‘Node Pole’, luring in other international computing giants.
“If you take the statistics, the temperature has not been above 30C [86F] for more than 24 hours since 1961. If you take the average temperature, it’s around 2C [35.6F].”
—Facebook to build server farm on edge of Arctic Circle

See, now that would have made for an interesting Plan nord.

[Update on Nov. 7th] Thought so, seems they are on it (FR) but Hydro didn’t find the idea interesting enough 3 years ago. Merci Josée pour le tip.

Great comment from Tom Coates on Tim Oreilly’s Buzz about Google vs Apple.

Honestly, I don’t think I agree here. Let’s have a look at Google’s recent actions – they’ve created a mobile phone operating system, taking on all the incumbents, which they’ve released for free. They’ve released their own phone, again taking on the whole phone industry, but particularly Apple. They’ve released the Chrome OS for netbooks, which is an open attack on Microsoft. SImilarly all of Google’s free productivity apps are an assault on Microsoft’s future. And then you have the browser, which is aiming to take share from Microsoft, but will also take on Firefox and Mozilla directly, while putting their funding in doubt.

It’s no wonder that the major technology companies feel nervous. Google somehow have moved from this geek-founded, good of the world company into turning all of their huge money from search into a systematic attack on every last one of the major players in the industry – taking the bottom out of all of their markets by releasing stuff essentially for free. While you could argue that this is about survival, or about making the web better, the other way to look at it is that it’s an incredibly aggressive anti-competitive move, along the lines of Microsoft installing IE on every computer, only not on one front, but on all of them.

You say that competition is good for the industry, and I would agree – that’s precisely why I find Google’s more recent moves a bit troubling. Doing this in one or two areas would be one thing, but OS’s, productivity apps, mobile phones, mobile phone OS’s and browsers on top of your core business of search and search advertising? I mean, that’s half the industry destabilised in the course of a year…

Google are not that far away from giving away phones to lock people into to using their search on mobile devices. Almost no one can compete with Google when they turn their eyes your way, because no one can compete with someone who doesn’t have to make any immediate money from their actions. Honestly, I’m sort of with Jobs here.

Last week the first Android phone came out, I think it looks cheap and I’m disapointed at what HTC pulled off hardware wise but I thought I’d mention it anyway. The gist :

T-Mobile G1 showcases some of the most advanced capabilities of Android, by including a touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, accelerated 3D graphics, Wi-Fi and 3G support, GPS and accelerometer. The device won’t have an impressive design and it won’t be as easy to use as an iPhone, but it will certainly be able to run a lot of interesting applications.

The iPhone looks like it’s quite a bit ahead still but competition is good to have, especially considering how the app store is pissing developers off lately. More info on RWW.

It seems that all rumors concerning Google eventually come to fruition, this time the long discussed browser has been announced. I’m pretty ambivalent about this one.

Just as Firefox, in certain places, is about to pass the combined numbers of all IE versions, I’m not sure I want to see another one in the mix although of course in terms of developer support vs effort it depends on standards support on their side. Safari did’t add that much effort when it came out because it features superb standards support.

However (I got to the Google blog from here through Digg but haven’t read anything else so I might have missed it) their announcement on the blog doesn’t mention web standards. Since they are partially based on Webkit support should be excellent but no mention of standards on a tech blog is not a good sign.

A new Javascript engine could be a good idea in terms of performance but what kind of work and bugs will it require for custom code and for libraries?

The “Omnibox” is the Google search box times 10, although the browser is open sourced, it’s not a move to fight Microsoft—they already did that by paying for some Mozilla developers—it’s a ploy to drive evermore trafic to their properties and this is dangerous. Google is already massively powerful and if people switch to Chrome in droves it’s not good for competition and gives yet more power to the all seeing and imperfect algorithm.

You will now be able to “pop open” a web app in a separate browser window with no address bar. One of the articles linked mentions making phishing attacks easier by removing the thought of addresses from peoples’ minds but it’s also one more step to the Google desktop / OS, I don’t know if there will be a full screen mode but it’s easy to imagine there being one. In which case users could potentially maximize Chrome, use Google apps and never see the operating system again. I couldn’t care less if Microsoft looses out but in such a scenario we are faced with a domination by a company driven by advertising and presenting revenu generating results, not just by a company out to sell more OSes and applications. It’s as big a potential unwanted “filter” between people and the whole of the internet as packet filtering by ISPs is. Net Neutrality is a big issue, Search Neutrality should be too and a Google browser doesn’t help that.

Think I’m exagerating by already talking about domination? I might very well be (and I hope so) but Chrome will no doubt bring more trafic to Google through search and apps (and then ads), do you have any doubt that they will quickly be offering deals to Dell, HP and others to make Chrome the default browser on new PCs against a cut of advertising revenu from those systems? Motivation like that can bring about adoption a lot quicker than better security, tabs and the average guy having to download and install which still helped Firefox gain a lot of traction relatively quickly.

The everpresent Google and the way people ignore it’s ubiquity is damned anoying and dangerous. I keep hearing about “Apple fanboys” but virtually all big techblogs are Google fanboys and no one talks bout it. They are always waiting for stuff from Google with trepidation, assuming it will be better and great, promoting the web office, never mentioning or seemingly even considering what it means to push your whole business in the Google cloud where it’s sliced, diced and advertised. It took me long enough to get smart to what we are putting in the hands of Google (merci Karl) but it’s taking even longer for those guys to get with it and it’s not helping things.

[Update] This is somewhat contrary to what I was saying earlier but; Chrome hasn’t been released yet for Mac and it’s based on the Apple backed Webkit, any chance the OSX version will instead be the next Safari using similar functionality and NOT a Google Chrome for OSX? As in, Apple is working with Google?

[Update 2] For those who think I’m being paranoid about imagined Google scenarios, check out what’s been noticed in the terms of service.

[Update to Update 2] Corrected.

Adobe opens Flash to Google and Yahoo so it can be indexed. Not sure how understandable what is indexed will be (vs semantically structured html page) and wetter Flash sites will need to be re-factored for a good indexation to be done. And of course, other issues remain.