Annual Computer Server Sales

At a recent presentation, Scott McNealy, the Chairman of the Board at Sun Microsystems, stated that estimates for 2007 were that worldwide sales of server computers were 8 million units. They believe that 1.5 million of these servers were purchased by Google. If you estimate the numbers purchased by Yahoo, MSN, Amazon.com, and Salesforce.com, it paints a picture in which server side computing is being dominated by a few big service providers. This seems to align with a statement that Sun’s CTO made in 2006 that “the world only needs 5 computers”. Most of these companies are creating a server-side infrastructure that can handle a huge load of the world’s computing needs as a subscription service, with few applications residing on the client-side (a.k.a. desktop or thin-client machines).

- Scott McNealy's Talk on the subject (somewhere on this page - they keep changing the URL)

- Greg Papadopolous' Five Computers:

Management of Technology Conference (IAMOT'07)

I am just back from the annual conference of the International Association of Management of Technology (http://www.iamot.org/) where I spoke on the changing role of the CTO in a growing corporation. I began by introducing the 5 Patterns of the CTO (see previous blog posts) and then applying those five patterns to the different growth phases of a company. The paper describes how the "Genius" CTO who was one of the founders of the company (think Steve Wozniak at Apple or Larry Page at Google) must change his pattern of behavior as the company grows. Larger companies require a CTO that is focused on the customer experience (the Advocate); managing technology vendors (the Administrator); running an R&D organization (the Director); or participating in the strategic plans for the organization (the Executive).

As always, the entire paper is posted online - see http://www.ctonet.org/documents/CTO_ChangingRole.pdf.

Google's Eric Schmidt - Growing Google and Google Culture

Google's revenue and employee head count have tripled in the last two years. How do you keep from becoming too bureaucratic or too chaotic?

It's a constant problem. We analyze this every day, and our conclusion is that the best model is still small teams running as fast as they can and tolerating a certain lack of cohesion. Attempting to provide too much order dries out the creativity. What's needed in a properly functioning corporation is a balance between creativity and order.

But we've reined in certain things. For example, we don't tolerate the kind of "Hey, I want to have my own database and have a good time" behavior that was effective for us in the past.

-- Wired, May 2007.