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Someone sent me this link that discusses the operations at Google. It is a very interesting to see how the search engine company went from this setup in 1997/98 to the 10,000+ servers in multiple data centers that the operation consist of today.

A few interesting quotes from the article:

“The company estimates that a server running Google applications all day is the equivalent of 40 years of use in a regular context. Approximately 82 of these servers die every day, but not completely; Google employs maintenance people who walk around with carts of hard disks, for example, and replace them in malfunctioning servers or UPSes.”

1 day = 40 YEARS of regular user? Yikes. I find that hard to believe, but interesting statistic. 82 servers dieing every day equates to a problem with each and every one of their servers every 4 months. I’m sure they figured out this is cost effective (google does employ some of the smartest people in the industry) but yikes!!

“Typing in Prada, Armani and Hugo Boss, for example, might bring up Versace and a number of other designer clothing labels. These kinds of ideas turned into prototypes in employees’ spare time, Nevill-Manning added; a company rule stipulates that 20 per cent of their work hours can be devoted to brainstorming.”

I’ve heard about this several years ago and I am glad to see Google is still up to the task — 20% of work hours are devoted to brainstorming. I absolutely LOVE this idea and wish more companies would follow suit. Employees are truly the most valuable asset to a company. Employees know how the company operates, can pinpoint areas which should be addressed, interact with all fascets of the company, from vendors, customers, supply chain, workflow, accounting, finance, marketing .. you name it, an employee is involved.

By promoting a certain amount of time per week or per month that employees can break out of their day-to-day mold and simply work on new ideas and come up with solutions to existing problems can have exceedingly great business value:

1. Problems that management might not be aware of are addressed.
2. Employees that are empowered to address issues are more committed to the company.
3. Employees will have a higher degree of understanding about all aspects of the business. When starting their own projects, they will be thinking about the prospective customer, the ROI, how it can be deployed, how it fits into the current operations of the company, how it gives the company a competitive edge in the competitive landscape, and so forth.

Anyways, interesting article.

Here is an interesting comment that I found on Slashdot regarding international business marketing. Granted, I think this can apply to many situations in business (and life in general) where someone simply is not able to understand the “problem”.

Its odd, but sometimes the most obvious solutions are the ones that are almost blatantly ignored in marketing (and in many other fields, I would imagine).

For instance, my International Political Economy professor at one point was on a plane heading for Brazil (he was studying something or other while there) and sat next to a guy who worked in the marketing department for the lab that produces and develops Mallox (or was it Alka-Seltzer?).

They got to talking and it turned out the guy was going down there to help figure out this problem they were having in sales. In some areas their product was selling very well, but in other areas it wasn’t selling at all. Marketing had spent billions of dollars (litterally) and said “people in those areas like products that are from the US, so we should put a little American Flag on the packages” and he was going down to do something of a feasability check on this.

My professor turned to him and said, evidently without missing a beat “your product isn’t selling well in those areas because your product provides relief for over-eating and the people in those areas are starving!”

The guy’s face dropped and shortly thereafter was taking down contact information and writing notes.

You would think this would be obvious, but sometimes that is exactly the solution is hiding.

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As seen here, police offers in a high-speed persuit of a stolen vehicle..