Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many years ago, Google made statements like "we only do things that scale, and customer support doesn't scale". It was a strong guiding philosophy for many of the engineers, but that philosophy has eroded. If we look at some of Google's biggest successes, it has been things that don't scale: - The Ground Truth team in India, manually drawing the world's maps. - Manual spam detection in search results - Customer Suppo…
Not to mention, scanning many thousands of books manually.
http://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-source...