Jeff Atwood blogged about Google building their own servers instead of buying off-the-shelf boxes, probably to justify his over-the-top workstation at work. The argument is,

• Google built their own servers on plywood back in 1999.
• Google is still building their own servers today, 450,000 of them!
• Therefore, build your own PC is good! Pre-built might only work for typical users, and programmers are not typical users!

Therefore Jeff concluded,

The best way to truly understand the commodity PC is to gleefully dig in and build one yourself. Get your hands dirty and experience the economics of computer hardware first hand— the same economics that have shaped the software industry since the very first line of code was stored in memory.

I disagree.