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trying to build software stacks on top of GFS, the company’s current storage
system, he questioned them about how well they could meet the perfor-
mance needs of applications, such as Gmail, with its millions of individual
e-mail transactions. And with the Build from Scratch team members who
wanted to rethink and rebuild Google’s storage systems from the bottom
up, he continually pointed out the scale at which their system would have to
operate—hundreds of millions of users generating massive amounts of data.
What he did not do was bring together the two competing teams to
confront each others’ ideas. Each team created its own marketplace of ideas
where creative abrasion could occur. Then he and his