[hojoff79]

Your condescending sarcasm aside, there is no reason for them to over market themselves or pursue pedestrian projects here (again, I agree this is a good business, but just relatively pedestrian for the Google X mission statement). Here are the reasons that would make no sense:

1) This is a pure cost center for Google (and a small one by their standards) and it doesn't report separately, so there is no reason for them to take lower risk projects to try and make it look like they are generating success (like there would be at a VC or incubator who is concerned with profitability). And for the Google X mission statement, I wouldn't even consider this a success (this would be like a VC fund backing a small business that was profitable but never had a chance of generating exponential growth, it's just not in the investment / research profile)

2) They have Google Ventures to fund something like this if it was an idea they want to pursue (and as I said up top and was seconded below, that may be why they are spinning it out). But that raises the question of why this was ever something they undertook at Google X in the first place? Another possibility here is they took a shot at something much bigger and found that wasn't viable, and fell back on this portion of it which was viable, then decided to spin it out. That would actually make a lot of sense (just thinking as I'm typing here)

3) If for some reason they are just over marketing Google X and it's just really a pedestrian incubator for some projects... well, going back to the original question I posed, i would find that very disappointing!

[Jormundir]

Well the way I see it (speculatively from the outside), the "moonshot" (throws up in mouth) is just the thing you write at the top of the whiteboard. But what you're really up to is solving the 50 relatively smaller, domain specific problems that need to be solved in order for the "moon--hghhh" to be achievable.

This green architecture software is likely a solution to one of those smaller problems. The team was probably so happy with their work they decided they wanted to pursue it as a standalone company. Google let them spin it out and invested seed money as well.