You are not going to get malware on a Chrome OS. You are not going to get security problems on a Chrome OS that has the developer’s switch,” said Google’s Chris DiBona. “But at the same time, if you are a developer, that sort of locking down stops you from innovating. It stops you from developing very quickly. So we wanted to make it possible to have the best of both worlds there.
In 1996, two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created a unique search engine called “BackRub” that ran on the school’s server. After one year, BackRub’s bandwidth outgrew the university’s needs. Its creators rebranded BackRub into Google, a respelled reference to “googol.” It is a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Google began as a business after its founders accepted a US$100,000 funding grant from Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim in August 1998. Page and Brin embedded their mission statement in their corporate name. They would organize a limitless amount of information on the World Wide Web.
Several years later, Google’s founders devised a list of 10 things they knew to be true about running their business. Item No. 2 was “it’s best to do one thing really, really well.” Google is now much more than a unique search engine. And Google does much more than catalog a world of information on its massive servers. Google does many things. But perhaps all of what it does still meets that key founding principle of organizing vast volumes of data on the Web.
