Google has reported a 26 per cent rise in profits and is making datacentre
improvement the focus of capital expenditure in the next quarter.
The company is not being hit by the downturn, according to chief financial
officer Patrick Pichette, but is cutting costs.
The bulk of the $452m spent last quarter went on datacentre improvements, and
Pichette explained that this trend would continue.
"We are investing heavily in datacentres and will continue to do so," he
said. "With the new equipment we can do a lot more today with less."
Of the 500 new employees the company has hired over the past quarter, over
half were engineers.
Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, reasserted the company's plans to invest in
infrastructure and new application development. He said that Google had added
more than one improvement a day to the company's technology portfolio.
"Energy efficiency is a key area for us," he said. "We now use several times
less power in our datacentres than typical facilities with the same number of
computers in other facilities."
The rate of page indexing had speeded up, Brin said, adding that every four
hours Google indexes the equivalent amount of information as is contained in the
Library of Congress.
Google Maps and Google Earth are also major areas of opportunity,
particularly user generated features. Already 56,000km of roads and 75,000
business listings had been added by users.
Brin is expecting strong sales of phones using the
Android
mobile operating system, and said that he had been using one as his primary
phone for a few months now and was very impressed.
Development on the Chrome browser would also continue, despite
lacklustre
take-up.
"We will continue to improve it and we have open sourced it entirely," he
said. "It raises the bar for all browsers, which is good because we want all
browsers to improve."
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