Google is a great company that thrives on innovation and technology. If you've never looked into Google's corporate culture, it is something you should definitely check out. One of the interesting things about the company is that each employee gets to pursue their own special project. The project takes up approximately 20% of the work week and can be completely unrelated from your job function. I wonder if this approach led to Google's next big investment: Offshore Wind Power. At first thought, it doesn't seem to go along with Google's core competencies, but maybe their strengths lie in innovation.
Google will be investing in the development of the Atlantic Wind Connection Project. After everything is said and done, approx $5 billion will be put into the project. Google has always been on the cutting edge of technology and after the BP oil spill disaster, I'm curious to see the return on this investment. Investing in energy may be the next big success for Google, although it will take a long time to payoff. The project isn't estimated to be finished until 2016. I'll finish the article with a quote from the article that shows just how new this project is:
“The North American wind industry hasn’t had any players involved with the motivation and financial heft to really move this market forward,” Hodges said. “Google could play that role.”
I believe that Google is more a culture than a product. Their core product is great search, but I've been keeping tabs on Google Labs for years and the ideas they come up with a quite fascinating.
ReplyDeleteGoogle has also taken a strong interest in power generation and the computing power per watt efficiency of their server farms. A possible reason is, they use a LOT of electricity for their data centers and being able to own each step of the production process would be a way to prove the viability of a combined data center / power center.
If you haven't seen Google Labs check out http://labs.google.com/ . My personal favorite is labs.google.com/sets .