Sergey Brin and Larry Page are neeeerdddssss, not business school kids that decided to make a web app.
There is a good chance that they're doing this just because it's really really cool, and because they can. I imagine that if I ever had the sort of cash that they have, I would be doing the same thing that I do on the weekends NOW, but on a larger scale: geekery.
Building a linux distro is geekery of the highest order. Good for them. Google makes billions and billions of dollars from their other projects. This is one that they can figure out later. :). (or I can figure it out for them now: adsense, lots of it.)
I understand that google is a publicly traded company; they have shareholders to answer to, but I imagine that all they have to do is point at their earnings and go "trust us, guys...trust us".
If anything, this will drive more traffic to their moneymakers.
There is probably some truth in what you say, albeit i wouldn't go so far to say that they're just nerds. They're business nerds, or they wouldn't be where they are today.
Also, i'd really appreciate if people would stop calling it a "linux distro". It makes as much sense than to call OS X a "BSD Distro"
I'm a CS grad student right now, and even I can see that'd be a pretty damn irresponsible way to run a business. Not that I think that's actually the motivation...
Sergey Brin and Larry Page are neeeerdddssss, not business school kids that decided to make a web app.
There is a good chance that they're doing this just because it's really really cool, and because they can. I imagine that if I ever had the sort of cash that they have, I would be doing the same thing that I do on the weekends NOW, but on a larger scale: geekery.
Building a linux distro is geekery of the highest order. Good for them. Google makes billions and billions of dollars from their other projects. This is one that they can figure out later. :). (or I can figure it out for them now: adsense, lots of it.)
I understand that google is a publicly traded company; they have shareholders to answer to, but I imagine that all they have to do is point at their earnings and go "trust us, guys...trust us".
If anything, this will drive more traffic to their moneymakers.