Google's Internal Company Goals

Rockgod writes to mention a Google Blogoscoped article about an internal company paper. The paper details Google's big goals and directions for 2006. From the article: "The list included several items, for example: Google wants to have an improved infrastructure to make their engineers more productive. This includes allowing employees to have a universal search tool "containing all public Google information searched on all Google searches." Google also wants to build 10MW of green power to be on track to be carbon neutral. (They also want to reduce "Borg disk waste" by 50%... hmmm, Borg?)

Comments

Products being reduced by 20%

[brian.glanz]

The one bit that concerns me as a user was

the document contains the simple directive "Count total number of Google products and reduce by 20%"

There have been many Google betas with low user populations, but here in the land of every-Google-launch-is-an-article, there might be a lot of /.ers who put time and effort and personal data into a Google beta only to see it disappear in the next year. Which Google apps are on the chopping block? Will they give users a nice way to export data?

Related and interesting fact

[ostehaps]

This morning 50% of Denmark's power supply was covered by wind power, due to a storm. During the peak (at 4 in the morning) it reached 80%. Generally about 20-25% of power is supplied by wind here.

borg.google.com

[Blighten]

Reading the comments of the article, "Jake" suggests that borg refers to borg.google.com, a very important internal subdomain. (James Bradbury)

A quick search revealed:

Google Finance Leaks Version Two Information (Search Engine Watch Blog, 2006-07-21)
Garett Rogers stumbled upon a link in Google Finance at the top right corner that said "v2 (test)" in red font. The link points to http://0.frontend-live.sfe.scrooge.hs.borg.google. com/finance, which seems to not be accessible from my location, or outside of Google's network. Notice the sign of the borg again? borg.google.com from before. So, now we have rumors that Google is going to be launching a version two of Google Finance soon. Maybe it includes stock indices from other worlds? :)... (http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/seo-news/topic -16812.htm)

I found this to be a little funny as well.

Re:green power

[drinkypoo]

As technology makes it cheaper you will probably start seeing just about everything generating power. I mean floors have to have a certain amount of give, and carpet flexes when you walk on it - if they were both piezoelectric then just walking around would generate some power. It's not economically feasible to do this right now but it's coming. Structures are flexible, too; if you could generate power from the slight movement due to the wind, thermal differentials, and the slamming of doors (not to mention generating power when a door is opened!) then it would all add up. It doesn't add up to very much, which is why we're not doing it now.