There's been a lot of blogosphere buzz recently on the possibility of Google buying Sprint—now that Sprint is out of the wireless Internet deal it put together with Clearwire. Everyone seems to think that Google is going after the 700-MHz spectrum coming up for grabs shortly and available for use supposedly after 2009 when broadcast TV goes all-digital. And Google has already announced a new mobile phone platform and is trying to cajole developers into doing something with it.

So you can see how the idea of Google buying Sprint would come into the conversation.

I have mixed feelings about whether this is a good idea or not for Google. Generally speaking, when tech companies and companies that have made their living from various Internet ideas dabble in "real" brick-and-mortar companies, they don't do well with them. The reason is simple: These are businesses that tech folks do not understand.

For one thing, such businesses are a lot more work than sitting on your duff watching the money roll in after you've done little more than invent some code and rent cheap labor from India to tweak it over the years.

Real work will have to be done if Google (or any Web-centric company) wants to get involved in a real business. Here are some of the hurdles that Google will have to clear if it wants to assimilate a company like Sprint:

1) Redistribution of time. Less time can be devoted to redesigning the Google 767 interior. Will there be time to shop for a new LCD TV for the plane if a structural engineer comes over to discuss the cell-tower corrosion in Des Moines caused by cow-flop vapors?

2) Endless meetings. Brick-and-mortar "real" companies such as Sprint have endless and mostly meaningless meetings about minutia such as logo dimensions. Should the "S" in Sprint be kerned tighter to accommodate the column width in a proposed advertisement in the New Yorker? Would that be a violation of the "don't edit the logo" rules established by a committee some years back? This will be followed by a meeting as to whether they should dissolve the "don't edit the logo" committee. In that meeting it will be discovered that nobody even knows who is on the "don't edit the logo" committee, and all evidence indicates there never was any committee in the first place--just some manager in the marketing department who put the rule in place. It will be discovered further that the only reason she put the rule in place was because that's what someone else did in the company where she worked before as a secretary. This rigmarole will take up most of a day. The next day will consist of meetings regarding unauthorized modifications to the Google-Sprint letterhead and whether or not the executive correspondence paper should be standardized as 12-pound ivory laid or plain cotton rag. The brightness factor of the paper will call for a second meeting.

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