Making sense of Google’s concepts

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO

In its self-proclaimed drive to make the world a better place, Google has immersed itself in far more than Internet search and online ads. But driverless cars and a wind energy farm in the Atlantic Ocean?

It may not always be immediately apparent to investors — they wish management would be frugal and focus on the stock price — but there’s usually calculated logic underlying Google’s unconventional strategy.

Google’s brain trust — founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with CEO Eric Schmidt — think differently than most corporate leaders, and may eventually encourage more companies to take risks that might not pay off for years, if ever.

The time is ripe for long-term thinking, with memories still fresh of the financial meltdown — a byproduct of Wall Street’s demands for companies to deliver ever-higher profits every three months and meet earnings targets set by analysts.

“Everywhere you look in this country, it seems that we are suffering from the consequences of too much short-term thinking,” said longtime Silicon Valley forecaster Paul Saffo of Discern Analytics.

It might be difficult to fathom how Google can justify paying for the development of robotic technology that has driven cars thousands of miles on California roads without a major accident and committing millions of dollars to help build a wind farm hundreds of miles from the Eastern Seaboard.

With a little imagination, it’s easier to see how Google might benefit. Saffo surmises that the driverless technology eventually could be implanted into a fleet of vehicles used for car sharing.

Google then could use a camera to take new pictures of streets and highways that appear in its online maps.

The company announced Tuesday it would buy a 37.5 percent stake in the Atlantic Ocean wind-energy project, investing in a network of deepwater transmission lines to bring power from still-to-be-built offshore wind farms.

That makes more sense when you realize Google already sucks up massive amounts of energy from the power grid and expects to consume even more in the next decade as it opens more data centers filled with row upon row of computers to run its Internet services.