Today the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission has granted “Google Energy” the official right energy, capacity, and services at market prices just like a utility. Google Energy is a new subsidiary of the search giant Google.

Now Google is saying that they want this to happen in their eternal quest to become carbon neutral. Yes, this makes sense. A recent study found (and Google confirmed it on their blog) that each Google search that you make uses about 7 grams of CO2 or about the same amount of energy as boiling a cup of water. Now that may sound minimal, but when we notice that 91,000,000 Google searches are preformed on average per day, it starts to raise some serious eyebrows. Google uses A LOT of energy!

I have owned a mac for 3 Years and 1 Day. I got into the Mac world by buying a small 13″ white macbook as I entered college. I stand before you today to proclaim that it was the best investment I have ever made. I could not be more happy. I love using my mac, and will never go back to using windows, at least for my personal computers (where i still have a choice). I could go on about why I am so happy with switching to mac, but the greatest reason I am so happy is that I am currently writing this post on that same mac, and it still runs and functions like the day I bought it.

I have made many, many upgrades to my mac over these past 3 years and 1 day. I have upgraded from Tiger to Leopard, and now to Snow Leopard. I have upgraded from iLife ’06 to iLife ’08 and to iLife ’09. I have done the same with iWork ’06, ’08 and ’09. I have ordered countless other programs to run on my mac and increase its’ functionality. I have been running Adobe Design Premium CS3 on it for nearly 3 years now, and now I even run Aperture 2.0. My mac has been my sidekick, as I attempted to start a business (which only ended because of personal life circumstances). All of these are wonderful upgrades that have added a ton of value to my mac, but none of those compare to the upgrade I am most satisfied with, Applecare.

Google Acquisitions and Investments (Graphic).

A subway map of Google's Acquisitions.

It was interesting for me, as I studied this article that I found through Digg. It was about Google’s Acquisitions over the years. We hear about them all the time, it isn’t anything new, but I guess what shocked me is how many of them that we haven’t heard about. And on top of that, how many of the technologies that Google has, have come directly through these acquisitions. I always assumed that Google was actually developing these technologies (silly me). This makes Google more of a holding company than anything else.

On top of that, when you look at the history of Google’s hiring and they have been known to sort of “buy out” the best in the industry. Everyone has heard about their wonderful accommodations and the benefits that their employees get, but does anyone ask why?

I ran across an interesting article recently. It was a blog post from a google employee. What shocked me about this article is that it isn’t like the article I had come to expect with one of Google’s 7,000 blogs they seem to publish.

It wasn’t about some new technology that they had invented. It wasn’t about how they were going to trash the competition with some new service that they will offer. It wasn’t about how wonderful their job is at the Googleplex , and how they get paid 6 figures for dinking around at their computer. No this article was from a Google employee, high up, that was leaving and actually expressing relief and discontent from the company. Maybe the days of Google Bliss are gone. Or maybe they never existed. One employee of seven years finally tells us the true story from the inside.