Yeah, well...
As far as I can see, we never had any discussion (at least, any interesting discussion as opposed to just braying) on this thread about whether Google's power bill was large. Obviously, it is large, and obviously they will take steps to control it.
The question--at least to me--was mostly how it compares with Google's payroll. In Schwartz' interview, he said specifically that the power bill is "probably as large", whereas no matter how many servers they have, it really probably isn't.
This doesn't mean the difference between the numbers is necessarily enormous. One can easily twiddle the parameters so a power bill with 100,000 servers, dozens of petabytes of storage, air conditioning, switching and so forth doesn't look vanishingly small next to a payroll with 5,000 employees.
In any event, somehow we swung from the trivia question "does electricity cost equal payroll cost" all the way over to the idiotic assertion that electricity doesn't matter at all, which it obviously does.
So we can continue to believe that Schwartz was right in his overall thrust about computing trends even if he got a little carried away with the specifics on the visual aids, and we can continue to hope that Sun has some new technologies to exploit those trends that will benefit shareholders in the near term.
--QS |
