What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [87]
Though Google has hired experts to work on energy in its own R&D labs, it isn’t doing the work alone. As of mid-2008, it had invested $36 million in outside R&D on power in addition to more than $4 million in RechargeIT. Google is not alone in seeing investment opportunities. At Davos, venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins—who invested in Google and sits on its board—held a reception for Bono and Gore (who advises both Google and Kleiner Perkins). Doerr talked about urgent needs and opportunities in energy; by 2008, his firm had raised $1 billion to invest in clean technology.
If Google did run a power company, what would it look like? It would give us all the power we could use at the best price possible, and then it would find ways to take advantage of that. Google could use the power grid itself to distribute the internet and that, too, would help Google, creating more advertising revenue, which could be used to subsidize the cost of our power and access. Google would give us data about our use of power—especially as more appliances become internet-connected. Imagine if every house were to have a web page detailing power usage by every device, as Google has done for its cars. That data would tell us how to conserve (if we even needed to anymore) and it would tell Google how we live (which, in aggregate, will make Google smarter). In his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman proposed a similar future with connected devices that manage their own power. If we can generate our own homemade solar, wind, or geothermal power, I have no doubt Google Power & Light would create a marketplace for us to sell power to the grid or donate it to charities. Power could become not only a new market but a new currency.
It’s too bad there never will be a Google Power & Light. It’s just not what they do for a living. But Google, being Google, may well remake the industry anyway.
GT&T: What Google should do
If only Google ran our cable and phone companies, how much better our lives would be and how much less time we’d spend on hold and at home waiting for the cable guy.
Well, Google has almost had cable and phone companies. The company gives away free wireless internet access in Mountain View, California, its headquarters’ town. It has been rumored to be thinking of offering public wi-fi in other cities but denies such plans. It also had been rumored to be working on making its own Google phone. Instead, it created an open mobile operating system, which any phone manufacturer may use (T-Mobile released the first). In an effort to push the Federal Communications Commission and the mobile phone industry toward openness, Google bid in an auction of wireless spectrum in 2008, making a bargain with the government: Google would guarantee a minimum price of $4.6 billion if the FCC required openness—that is, that any device (such as those powered by Google’s operating system) could operate on much of the spectrum bought and run by the phone companies. Google didn’t win the auction—it won the point. For a few hours, though, it had the highest bid on the table and could have ended up with spectrum and a phone company.
In a forum in Washington, D.C., Larry Page looked a bit dreamy and wistful as he recalled that for a day, his company was in the phone business. Imagine what he could have done with that. At this moment in the show, we should see Page scratching his chin and looking upward as a cloud floats over his head and he ponders an alternative future, a vision based on openness and ubiquitous connectivity. That’s the real dream: Google everywhere. Google is constantly nudging to get more internet access for more people at better prices. This campaign is in its self-interest. “If we have 10 percent better connectivity in the U.S.,” Page told Reuters, “we get 10 percent more revenue