At a lunch for New York journalists this week, Eric Schmidt, Google’s grown-up CEO, said: “Office is not the business we’re in,” despite the purchase of Writely. Google could do with a good rich-text editor, he intimated.

Well, here at Google Future we’ve been saying that for a while in the face of a stream of speculation that the G-guys were planning an all-out assault on Microsoft’s cash cows. The meme was carried along by such luminaries as Jason Calacanis who thought this was exactly what they had in mind.

However, recent damp-squib releases and leaked performance forecasts which talked the company down, have all contributed to the realization that the denizens of the Googleplex are human after all, and not some posthuman advance of the species.

The fact remains, Google is not a software company. Google Pack proved that. The company is essentially a search-based advertising agency with wide aspirations to control the markets of a wide range of media, including IPTV, the next big thing.

Schmidt also said that says that fears over the loss of “network neutrality” are largely unfounded.

The Register reports: “Intriguingly, Schmidt said no infrastructure or service provider has yet to ask Google to pay a higher toll. Comments by AT&T chief Ed Whitacre [suggested] that content providers need to pay more to guarantee traffic quality for data moved over his company’s pipes.”

It’s hard to see how the current freedom enjoyed by everyone on the Internet could be dispensed with in “the land of the free”.

“On the other hand, Verizon’s expensive fiber investments leave plenty of capacity to spare to carry internet traffic such as the web page you’re reading alongside the IPTV services it wants to introduce. And it’s hard to see who else is going to invest in bringing the USA’s increasingly antiquated network infrastructure up to date.”

Google’s acquisition of large amounts of “dark” (abandoned) fiber, plays into this question and surely points the way forward for the company. An online Office has been a red herring Agatha Christie would be proud of.