Saving The World At Google?

Recently it seems that Google is operating under a new mandate. Time was that “Do No Evil” was the corporate mantra, guiding their every move. Two highly publicized initiatives take this philosophy a step further. The Google phone promises to reduce competition and deliver a better cell phone experience. The Google energy project hopes to make electric power generation cheaper than coal, benefiting all of mankind; not just those with cell phones.

What’s behind this new “Go Forth And Do Good”, save the planet attitude in Mountain View? Are these initiatives really altruistic in nature? Or designed to expand the ever widening impact Google has on our lives in the drive to enhance profits?

From the sound of it, the Google phone project is really software driven. They’ll be developing an operating system for handsets. Developing software is certainly something Google has experience with. They’ll probably pull this off and add a nice little revenue stream to their operations.

And to be fair I must mention that Google power is a project of Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company. It’s their job to be benevolent. But what do the folks at Google know about power? Do they really think they can solve this? Well, they certainly know how to consume electricity. The company’s actual electric use is a closely guarded secret. One can only imagine the drain on the grid created by their millions of servers.

Come to think of it, this project certainly has profit enhancement written all over it. Google shifts spending on developing cheap power to their non-profit to write off the millions they’ll spend in R&D. Google will then become the first customer for whatever system they come up with, paying below market prices for the technology.

The bottom line wins again. Brilliant!