Until last week’s events at Amazon, I would have never believes a big company would leave themselves that vulnerable, so maybe your scenario is possible.

Does this mean the big tech companies will suddenly have to be nicer to their customers?

It doesn’t make sense that one company should have the power to erase a 20-year swath of humanity simply by hitting the delete key. The people of the world created the information, and should have some say in the long-term preservation of it. It quickly loses its value if its stored on sticks and floppies in people’s closets. There is great value in the aggregation of the data.

Our systems are flawed and this hasn’t been thought through very well.

Personally, I think that only the latter is of much interest. The first two are only different from past information security and safety in terms of mode. A certain number of copies of each thing are kept, and people clean house. This is fairly standard in business and personal life. Companies store old data they aren’t using with delete/destroy dates based on current legal requirements. Individuals eventually go through their deceased loved ones belongings and trash the trash. Web companies are also known to delete unused accounts (despite facebook’s belief that they are the mecca of the internet). We have always lost information to fire, espionage, and misplacement. As for the last issue, I completely agree. A whole planet of anthropologists could make a lifetime out of digging out our old data, reverse-engineering the technology, and throwing panoramas up in their museums depicting us.

But, if you’re simply focused on the feasibility of Google failing, you’re missing the point. The name “Google” can easily be replaced with names like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, or LinkedIn. Even changing the name, you’re still overlooking the problems associated with the gaping holes we have in our global data systems.

I can see that you’re very focused on the failure points of the scenario. Granted, the scenario has its shortcomings and probably should have been framed better. However, failures happen to companies in thousands of different ways. As an example, a failure could result from a series of well-orchestrated EMP blasts, internal economic failures, some highly contagious disease inside the company, an internal mutiny among Google employees, or even a combination of things going wrong, just to name a few.

However improbable they may seem, the likelihood of them happening is still greater than zero.

A few months before their failure, people would have also thought it absurd for the likes of Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, WorldCom, GM, Enron, and Chrysler to collapse.

The life expectancy of a corporation is measured at best in decades, not centuries. In the end, all companies will fail. Some sooner than others.

The bigger question remains, though, about what happens to the data that these private companies have in their archives. Does it just go away? Does the legacy that our generation has been entrusting to Google-like companies and their servers simply disappear?

If you pay close attention to the problems, you will also begin to see the opportunities.

Tom

Secondly, that attack was at internal operations data, and did not get at “search” related data, those machines are NOT located in Mountain view or any other physical facility at any Google campus. Google’s search servers are scattered around the world in self-contained units — literally shipping containers — at various data centers.

So any attack, well orchestrated or otherwise would not succeed in bringing down Google’s core services unless the attack also brought the ENTIRE INTERNET down with it.

Even a DNS level attack as exposed a couple years back in which entire domains could be hijacked would not be enough to kill it.

And while a physical assault on Google with assassins and/or missiles might seriously harm them, they could still move on and continue since they are owned by shareholders and new staff and facilities could be obtained. In fact, a sudden vacuum in personell could be swiftly filled by eager technical grads from MIT and CalTech and Stanford as well as ex=pats from Microsoft Oracle and other high tech firms.

There is quite frankly no way to kill Google from any other means outside of market competitions. Give it 10 or 20 years, after the founders are less-interested or gone and their current brain-trust is retired and their culture has changed to more of a back-biting, self-congratulating bureaucracy. Then we might see them start to wither and fade in the face of innovation from new competition.”

Good dye Google!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bakare Ayodele
Lagos, Nigeria