Agreed. I went to a state college not at all respected for software engineering graduates and Google got ahold of me this summer asking if I had interest working for them (I declined). Google could (largely) care less what school you went to. Your work, what you do after school, should speak to your talents and if they only want the elite based on your post-college work, well then good for them. Why would they hire you when your history yells "I'M MEDIOCRE!" You have to prove yourself beforehand. Oh, and if the job posting has the statement "if you plan to become [an expert in distributed computing]", I'd say that's far from saying only the elite will be considered.

Anyway, the post is largely silly. The OP goes into a rant on "I don't care about any of what Google does", then mentions Google+ and MapReduce. Yes, that's all Google has going on these days. Saying Google can't keep up with the world when Amazon can is beyond ridiculous. Hell, Google has defined a large part of the modern world and continues to expand on that. Honestly, I'm a larger fan of Amazon than Google, but Amazon IS TRYING to catch up to Google and only dabbles in a small percentage of what Google does. The OP only points out a few features that Amazon has that Google doesn't (or at least doesn't offer openly and freely to all). Going past that, Google's offerings extend so much farther than Amazon's that it's hard to even begin listing them. Want a 3D representation of the entire world? Google has you covered. You could make those statements for pages.

Why do we even argue about this silliness?