I think you are referring to the observations of John Gapper, Michael Mace & Ben Evans...
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John Gapper @ FT:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e57abef0-cd0c-11e2-90e8-00144...
"The best comparison for Google seems to me not Microsoft in the 1980s but General Electric in the late 19th century – the age of electrification. Like GE, Google is a multifaceted industrial enterprise riding a wave of technology with an uncanny ability not only to invent far-reaching products but also to produce them commercially.
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Michael Mace:
http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.in/2014/01/google-conglome...
The idea behind the “Internet of Things” is that network connectivity is moving into almost everything. If that’s Google’s investment thesis, it could rationalize an investment in almost any industry. Appliances? Absolutely. Shipping and logistics? You bet. Phosphate mining? OK, maybe not that. But any category of products that have electronics in them is fair game, as are any services that rely on data management. That’s going to be most of the economy. If that’s the case, we’ll need to evaluate Google’s strengths and weaknesses differently. We should worry less about the overall grand plan, and more about the management structure of its businesses, the skills of its general managers, and the efficiency of the support staff behind them. In other words, will Google be more like GE or like HP?
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Ben Evans:
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/2/19/ways-of-thinkin...
Hence, one could argue that Nest or self-driving cars (and the next big hardware move that Google does) are not really about understanding 'information' in any sense, and certainly not about advertising, but about finding ways to deploy being very good at machine learning and, say, connected systems, just as GE's business is to be very good at making big complicated precision-engineered pieces of capital equipment.