What Would Google Make?

So I'm about halfway through reading Jeff Javis' book What Would Google Do? following a recomendation from Andy (of 24-7box fame) and it has me thinking; neither Jeff (a proffessor of media), or Google (gatewayt to the 'net) actually produce a physical product. OK, so Jeff's words/work end up in a book (I know this, it's in my bag), but it I think he'd admit that if he coudl have made the same money posting in on the web, he would have done! So for me and an engineer (whose product is actually a thing, in a box, on a shelf; what Jeff would call selling 'atoms') how can I learn from the WWGD message?

I have two great hopes in finding the answer to this:
1, it's in the second half of the book!
2, I'm in R&D, so a lot of what I do still takes the form of the kind of ephemoral thought/ideas/information that Google delivers to us today.

Can an engineer learn from google? Does web2.0 offer us the means to make better atoms? I'm going to keep reading and find out....