A lot of engineers have passed through Google. The interesting thing about the Bay Area at least as this sort of porous sponge works both ways, people come from competitors, people go too competitors, they all carry a point of view and their own view on solving the problems at hand.<p>I am fortunate that I spent a few years in the platforms group and got a good look at how Google did what they did, and with that perspective have watched ideas in data center design emerge and flow. As the article points out Google does publish interesting bits of data, which lead to certain conclusions. And many of the same things that drove Google to do what it did, become the more likely answer when you own the entire data center (or better yet build it from scratch). I sat through a presentation of the big Ebay data center project in Utah and noted how they were coming up with the same answers to some of the same problems.<p>Because of that I doubt any one person is largely responsible there. There seems to have been a lot of cross pollination.