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Re:Google joins Open Compute Project to drive standards in I... by ChuckMcM on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @06:18PM (#11256385)
I don't think it is speculation, Google has always considered the infrastructure things they did as a competitive advantage, super top secret stuff that even other employees don't know about kind of silos.

And to your second point, it is interesting that OCP (some of it perhaps influenced by people who had worked at Google and then later worked at Facebook) appears to have minimized some of the advantages Google had, and now they find themselves possibly getting behind (one of the nice things, and bad things, about open projects like this are that you get a lot more resources applied to making things better than one company can muster).

For similar reasons I wonder if ARM will displace x86 if only because there are probably 15 to 20 independent teams of smart people with ARM architecture licenses making better ARM processors, and perhaps 4 such teams at Intel making improvements in the x86 architecture. At some point it seems "open" seems to eventually overwhelms "walled garden." Although I'm totally open to counter examples where that hasn't been the case.

Re:Google joins Open Compute Project to drive standards in I... by jldugger on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @08:13PM (#11256832)
From what I've seen the challenge ARM faces in the datacenter is support for ECC ram.
Re:Google joins Open Compute Project to drive standards in I... by ChuckMcM on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @08:45PM (#11256948)
I agree with that, I would love to see an ARM server chip with a full ECC memory path. However I note that ECC memory subsystems are "well understood" from a hardware perspective so one of the teams working on ARM processors will no doubt apply that to their version and we'll if there is more demand than just the two of us :-)
Re:Google joins Open Compute Project to drive standards in I... by atomic77 on Thursday March 10, 2016 @11:15AM (#11260025)
I certainly agree with the underlying idea, and maybe its not an apples to apples comparison, but Openstack would be an example of an open cloud platform that has failed to provide such benefits.

Rackspace has largely abandoned the project after initially opening it up, and public clouds based on Openstack seem to be getting shut down left and right (I could go on a long rant about why that is the case, since I am an Openstack contributor :)