Based on the profile of Eric E Schmidt by The New York Times (excerpt below), he is as solid a manager as Tim Cook from Apple.
Before coming to Google, Mr. Schmidt was chief executive of Novell, a staid computer networking company in Provo, Utah. At Novell, he led strategic planning, management and technology development from 1997 until 2001.
Before joining Novell, Mr. Schmidt was chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, where he worked for 14 years. At Sun, he led the team that developed the popular Java programming language. Mr. Schmidt, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, was also a researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, the institution that helped to develop laser printing, the graphical user interface and the Ethernet.
Mr. Schmidt, born 1955, has spent much of his career battling Microsoft, first at Sun Microsystems and Novell, and now at Google. His resentment of Microsoft, it seems, stems in part from his view that it is a triumph of market muscle over superior technology — a common belief in Silicon Valley.
In 2008, Mr. Schmidt led Google’s effort to scuttle Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. But Google walked away from a controversial advertising partnership with Yahoo after the Justice Department notified the companies that it would file an antitrust suit to block it.
Here’s his full profile from The New York Times.
Tags: Eric Schmidt, Google
Indeed, Schmidt is as solid a manager as Tim Cook is. That’s why both companies have done so well in the past decade. It’s not enough to be innovative, you need a steady, organised and dynamic hand to make sure the supply chain keeps up with the demand, marketing and PR is done properly, retail operations are up to specs, all the most mundane stuff that needs to be tied up so the innovators can just concentrate on developing their new toys.