"[Google's culture] has led to many innovations - from the search first homepage, to the NoSql movement, powering webmail by Ajax ..."
C'mon now. Outlook Web Access and Oddpost used Ajax-like technologies for webmail long before GMail's first line had been coded.
Also, while BigTable certainly has had some influence on NoSQL, I find it difficult to credit Google with the entire movement considering how long these types of DBs have been around. Petabyte-scaled high performance DB storage? Maybe. NoSQL? Nope.
Ford didn't invent the automobile or mass production either, they just elevated it to a new level that defined it for an entire era, just as Google did with AJAX.
I wouldn't credit Google with as big a part with the NoSQL movement. BigTable is a big innovation but it wasn't making much of an impact on the rest of the industry for a long time. Memcache probably had a bigger impact on the NoSQL movement, for example.
This is more common than most folks seem to think. I've noticed the curious delusion in talking to acquaintances where ABMers who stridently complain about Microsoft innovations and tools insist that XHR "doesn't count because Google made it popular."
When gently informed (not reminded--most of the ones I know have never touched Outlook in their lives) that Outlook Web Access was the reason XHR was invented, the response so far has invariably been "but that doesn't count, because it's Microsoft."
I somewhat chalk it up to the "cool factor" that surrounds Google, but a good part of it may just be ignorance.
I think it was actually Google Maps that made XHR popular, not GMail. With GMail, people figured that the AJAX-interactivity was cool, but not groundbreaking. With Maps, it opened up fundamentally new interaction models that didn't exist before.
This is somewhat ironic, since Maps didn't use XHR at all, and instead used an iframe transport. For that matter, "AJAX"-enabled Google Search also uses an iframe and contains no XML. Monikers are weird.
A draggable tiled map doesn't require XHR or iframes. It's a bunch of img tags next to each other, and some JavaScript that sets their src and position.
IMHO the NoSQL interest began increasing with the "Prevalent System" design pattern. People realized that when programming with Java etc. it was easier to have the info in RAM rather than deal with RDBMS.
C'mon now. Outlook Web Access and Oddpost used Ajax-like technologies for webmail long before GMail's first line had been coded.
Also, while BigTable certainly has had some influence on NoSQL, I find it difficult to credit Google with the entire movement considering how long these types of DBs have been around. Petabyte-scaled high performance DB storage? Maybe. NoSQL? Nope.