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I understood the article to be focusing on Microsoft vs. Google in terms of their approach to the same set of challenges in the web sphere. ("Google has questioned Microsoft's entire approach to online infrastructure")

In this respect, it would seem that Google's "horizontal" infrastructure stack makes it more adept at handling web-scale problems across multiple domains (versus Microsoft's "vertical" problem-by-problem approach).

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Agreed. This debate was in the context of cloud computing. After working with Google App Engine and their datastore API, I more fully appreciate the willpower required by their developers.

Some queries that would be relatively easy (and not super-scalable) have to be reformulated so computation is done on write and not on read. An example is writing an app that uses ranking and decay: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html

There's a different set of tricks to learn, so in the context of cloud computing, if you aren't willing to confine your approaches to those amenable to truly distributed cloud computing, you're not addressing the basic problems. Of course, there will be apps that can work effectively without web-scale, but are you talking about the "cloud" at that point or just hosted apps?

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