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mendax writes:

Wired has published an interesting article on just how big Google is. I doubt the numbers will surprise anyone here, but they are interesting nonetheless. From the article:

How big is Google? We can answer that question in terms of revenue or stock price or customers or, well, metaphysical influence. But that’s not all. Google is, among other things, a vast empire of computer software. We can answer in terms of code.

Google’s Rachel Potvin came pretty close to an answer Monday at an engineering conference in Silicon Valley. She estimates that the software needed to run all of Google’s Internet services—from Google Search to Gmail to Google Maps—spans some 2 billion lines of code. By comparison, Microsoft’s Windows operating system—one of the most complex software tools ever built for a single computer, a project under development since the 1980s—is likely in the realm of 50 million lines.

So, building Google is roughly the equivalent of building the Windows operating system 40 times over.

The comparison is more apt than you might think. Much like the code that underpins Windows, the 2 billion lines that drive Google are one thing. They drive Google Search, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google+, Google Calendar, Gmail, YouTube, and every other Google Internet service, and yet, all 2 billion lines sit in a single code repository available to all 25,000 Google engineers. Within the company, Google treats its code like an enormous operating system. “Though I can’t prove it,” Potvin says, “I would guess this is the largest single repository in use anywhere in the world.”

This is not the first time I've heard Google's entire cloud-based ecosystem all over the world being compared to one enormous operating system, or even a single computer. It's nice to see confirmation of this concept. As for Windows and its 50 million lines of code? Well, I don't think Windows was that much of an achievement in software engineering since the introduction of Windows 95.

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