Lean Austria

A search machine? A bunch of Web services? An internet company?

Don Tapscott mentions in his Speech (I posted the link yesterday):

… they call themselves a technology company. They’re really an ad agency because that’s how they make money is selling ads. But Google is also a media company. They bought YouTube, and they’d like to move all media onto the web. Google is a high-speed networking company providing high-speed wireless in San Francisco, and soon throughout the world…

…Google is a retail company because they’re selling stuff. Once you’re a retail company you need a payment system. So eBay has PayPal; Google has GBuy. Once you have a payment system, you’re a financial services company…

…Google is now the fourth largest hardware manufacturer in the United States, maker of servers. They have one customer — themselves. Football-field-size server farms that are eating up the power grid of California

Today I checked the the latter and found a last years NY Times Article A Search Engine That’s Becoming an Inventor where they quote:

…“Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine,“ said Martin Reynolds, an analyst with the Gartner Group. „They are building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost unimaginable.“ He said he believed that Google was the world’s fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M…

…Google is among Advanced Micro’s five largest clients, and the largest that does not make computers to resell,..“

…It hopes that it can build a lead that will allow it to create products that do more, for less money, than its rivals…

Interesting insights from one of todays most successful digital companies.