Google data centers in late 2013 and began selling off the barges in 2014. Most of the software stack that Google uses on their servers was developed in-house. According to a well-known Google employee, C++, Java, Python and (more recently) Go are favored over other programming languages. For example, the back end of Gmail is written in Java and the back end of Google Search is written in C++. Google has acknowledged that Python has played an important role from the beginning, and that it continues to do so as the system grows and evolves. The software that runs the Google infrastructure includes:
Google the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefitted because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place. There were concerns that Google's IPO would lead to changes in company culture. Reasons ranged from shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions to the fact that many company executives would become instant paper millionaires. As a reply to this concern, co-founders Brin and Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not change the company's culture. In 2005, articles in "The New York Times"