I get a peculiar feeling about Google's hiring of Vint Cerf, (grand)father of the Internet. Cerf comes from MCI, where his title was Senior Vice President for Technology Strategy. That job description does not evoke images of Cerf sinking his hands into code at a cubicle in the middle of the night, but does make one think that he participated robustly at MCI's product meetings. His title at Google—Chief Internet Evangelist—is alarmingly fluffy. It's the sort of title given to a talking head who delivers sound bites on camera while being kept far away from company meetings. I know because I was the Internet Evangelist for WebTV in 1996, and believe me, I had nothing whatsoever to do with product development. The job of an evangelist is to popularize concepts and make them relevant to uninitiated demographics. That hardly seems like something Google needs, and it would be insulting to ask Vint Cerf to do it.

But that's just the title, and is probably unimportant. Stefanie Olsen digs up past quotes from Vint Cerf that reveal his interest in wireless lifestyle solutions, and in Google Earth particularly.