Dear Google,

What have you done lately to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful?” Seriously, all I hear about lately is how you’re spending and making lots of money. Where does the information fit in?

So, is DoubleClick going to help you make things useful to me? I doubt it. It looks like it’ll help you eliminate competition. Perhaps then you’ll have the time to focus on organizing information?

Will Clear-Channel suddenly make things accessible for me? I don’t understand how a larger advertising inventory is going to help with that. I’ve never met a sales agent that claims to have knowledge, let alone make it useful for me.

So what are you doing? Have you really built anything lately? I see you’re testing out a voice search. That’s pretty neat. It’s certainly not front-page, world earth-shattering change. I also see you’ve thrown up some hiking trails and more map-related stuff. I suppose that’s useful. But, are you still primarily doing what you set out to accomplish?

To me it seems you’re too deep in the money-making business and everything else has taken a back seat. Or, maybe you’ve been diligently working on something special. Maybe this is something you’re actually going to build yourself, too (Hmm, Writely, Spreadsheets, YouTube). Does it really take a lot of employees to buy and assimilate others’ products?

I don’t know, maybe I’m being silly. If there’s something I missed here maybe I’m being ignorant. Or maybe you’re not communicating it to me. Google, you used to excite me about something worth-while, not just advertising. What gives?

Yours truly,
Devin Reams

PS: I think I get it now. Sergey said: “It has been our vision to make Internet advertising better - less intrusive, more effective, and more useful ….” Aha! Advertising is what you guys call “the world’s information.”