Of course in 20 years, we'll probably all be sitting around talking about how Google went the way of Xerox....

It's an important distinction:

Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page wants to be more like Thomas Edison than Nikola Tesla. “If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody,” he recently told Fortune. “You’ve got to actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.” Edison did thatwith practical incandescent light, the phonograph, the movie camera, and hundreds of other inventions. Tesla had his grandiose successes, too, but a shrewd businessman he was not. “He couldn’t commercialize anything,” Page added. “He could barely fund his own research.”

Staggering numbers:

According to the United States Census Bureau there are approximately 6 million car accidents per year resulting in more than 3 million injuries and 40,000 deaths.

Wow:

The Wall Street Journal broke this story back on May 24 stating:

Google is deep into a multipronged effort to build and help run wireless networks in emerging markets as part of a plan to connect a billion or more new people to the Internet. These wireless networks would serve areas such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia to dwellers outside of major cities where wired Internet connections aren’t available, said people familiar with the strategy.