As Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs hands over day-to-day running of the company to COO Tim Cook, Google announces in a shocker that its co-founder Larry Page will take over the reins of the company from chief executive Eric Schmidt.
As the new chief executive, 38-year-old Larry Page will “merge Google’s technology and business vision,” Schmidt said in a blog post. He is currently the president of products in Google.
The 55-year-old Schmidt will be staying in Google as the Executive Chairman and serve as an advisor to Page and co-founder Sergey Brin. Schmidt will focus on external issues like “deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership.”
37-year-old Sergey Brin, who is currently the president of technology, will focus on strategic projects, especially new products and assume the simple title of Co-Founder.
When Schmidt first joined Google in 2001, people in the Silicon Valley joked that the company was finally going to get some “adult supervision.” According to The New York Times, “neither Mr. Brin nor Mr. Page, the company’s co-founders, had much formal work experience in the technology industry besides the work they were doing at Google, which they started in 1998.” Neither of them has ever been the CEO of a public company.
Now, Schmidt writes on his Twitter account to some 225,000 followers that “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed.”
Page will be helming a company with 24,000 employees – more than 100 times the 200 odd employees when Schmidt took over 10 years ago.
His challenges inlcude intense rivalry from Facebook, the world’s largest networking site founded in 2004, which boasts more than 500 million users. Google also competes with Apple in mobile advertising, and with Yahoo and Microsoft in its traditional search arena.
The management changeout was announced during the press release on Thursday of Google’s Q4 financial results, which beat forecasts by Wall Street analysts.
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.
