Guido's calculator, like many of ours, is the interactive Python prompt. There is a good reason Python 3000 will default to infinite precision floating point calculations (or whatever they call it) ... Guido joined Google! Working at Google makes numbers completely meaningless to you. About two months in, it hits you, your brains melt out your ears, and the number of stars in the universe isn't really all that big a number anymore. Python's front man is on Google's payroll now, so Python must be able to handle the need to calculate petabytes and nanoseconds.
Google currently enjoys a huge infrastructure advantage but it's not one that couldn't be taken away by technical change unless they were to corner the market in the production of new storage and network bandwidth.
This may be true. Computer infrastructure isn't like, say, railroads. Moore's law keeps halving the worth of their computer hardware investment every 18 months. The real opportunities for cornering the market are in those things that are not, so far, technologically scalable: air conditioning, data center size, electricity, mechanical failure, number of technicians, software. Google has expertise in these, true, but there's nothing stopping other companies from getting it.
Clever use of rice to drive the point home.
It is, but it might be a little misleading. The "terabyte" picture of the giant ship, for example: many new computers come with half that much space on their hard drive already.
Sure, but a terabyte of rice is still a giant ship.