[hardwaresofton]

Agree on the knee jerk reaction to be very cynical towards everything google does, I'm sure in doing this we miss things that were relatively altruistic (assuming they do those things).

However, leveraging education accounts to get other 'paid' contracts, and exposing their technology, values, and brand to students at an early age is actually has quite a bit of value. It is a profitable long term move, that can have a very big payoff, if they can get people into the walled garden that is google services as early as possible.

The same value that's currently going to google doesn't necessarily get instantly more palatable in Canonical's hands, but if I were to give a student something to learn on (on which they could quite possibly discovery programming, or systems administration), I'd give them the less-locked-down Ubuntu.

This strategy seems like it leaves less of an avenue to create software, than just consume it (from the web).