Rebecca Lynn says we should because of its Motorola acquisition (tip o' the antlers to ).

Since mobile is undergoing the most rapid technology adoption in history, Google needs to own the "last mile" to the eyeballs.

Does it? Microsoft never got into the computer hardware business, and yet it somehow still owns the desktop operating-system market. Of course, it's easier to switch search engines than it is to switch operating systems.

The Macalope remembers being roundly lectured, five years ago, about how operating systems would soon be dead because the Web was the new operating system and soon we'd all be connected all the time and it'd all happen in the browser, dude, and Apple and Microsoft would be swept away by this new paradigm. And yet here we are in 2011, and the biggest name in doing it all on the Web is not pouring dollars into developing an operating system, it's getting into the hardware business. Weird.

But here's what I believe. Google's business is search advertising. Everything they do is an effort to grow search.