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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.
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