My hypothetical vision of the most valuable company in Bitcoin-land is not just a mining company, but instead a company that really capitalizes on Bitcoin as a PLATFORM instead of a currency - for example, enabling USD->BTC->USD transactions for significantly less than credit card fees. ... Who is more trusted and better funded to have done all this than AM?
You ask for utilizing bitcoin as a platform, yet you fall back to traditional thinking and are constrained by the notion of bitcoin as a unit of account.
If you really want to look into the future of this emerging technology you have to take the 50,000 feet view and realize that bitcoin combined a few concepts which are revolutionary beyond monetary use. You now have a decentralized transactional database for irreversible record keeping: the blockchain. This has a tremendous utility for the global society beyond monetary uses. For starters, it allows you to build tamper-detection into every database in the world by computing incremental hashes and submitting them as a bitcoin transaction. Maybe the whole software distribution system can be standardized by letting software developers issue a bitcoin transaction, whenever they release software, making the current system of using certificates obsolete (e.g. a potential application of colored coins).
Whatever the future of bitcoin holds, ASICMINER is a project to serve the mining community first and foremost. Google's "innovation" to go into the "ad" space was not really an innovation - it was the realization that users are willing to pay services by delivering their private information. And that there are companies who a willing to pay cash for that private information. Are you suggesting that ASICMINER should try to develop new monetizing strategies for their deployed hashing power? E.g. by offering a zero-transaction fee inclusion in exchange for something the user is willing to give up? Or maybe even a reward, based on the mining subsidy?