The Dec 13 '07 cover story from BusinessWeek provides a fascinating look at a small, but incredibly ambitious initiative within the company called "Cloud Computing" (I first bounced around a few catchy titles for this post, but none of them rivaled the actual BW headline... "Google and the Wisdom of the Clouds)."
The idea was hatched by a 20-something Google engineer and in short, it provides access for outsiders (i.e. Universities and other companies) to Google's computing power. As is detailed in the article, there are only a few companies around (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon) with the raw computing power to do something like this and it's fascinating to see what will become of it. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm
