Was Eric Schmidt pushed or did he jump? Both. According to close advisors, the Google C.E.O. was upset a year ago when co-founder Larry Page sided with his founding partner, Sergey Brin, to withdraw censored searches from China. Schmidt did not hide his belief that Google should stay in the world’s largest consumer marketplace. It was an indication of the nature of the relationship Schmidt had with the founders that he—as Brian Cashman of the Yankees did this week—acknowledged that the decision was made above his head. He often joked that he provided “adult supervision,” and was never shy about interrupting the founders at meetings to crystallize a point. In the eleven interviews I conducted with him for my book on Google, he freely told anecdotes about the founders, sometimes making gentle fun of them, never seeming to look over his shoulder. Yet he always made clear that they were “geniuses” and he, in effect, was their manager. After a bumpy first couple of years after he joined Google as C.E.O. in 2001, they had developed a remarkable relationship. But also a weird one. How many successful organizations have a troika making decisions? Schmidt, according to associates, lost some energy and focus after losing the China decision. At the same time, Google was becoming defensive. All of their social-network efforts had faltered. Facebook had replaced them as the hot tech company, the place vital engineers wanted to work. Complaints about Google bureaucracy intensified. Governments around the world were lobbing grenades at Google over privacy, copyright, and size issues. The “don’t be evil” brand was getting tarnished, and the founders were restive. Schmidt started to think of departing. Nudged by a board-member friend and an outside advisor that he had to re-energize himself, he decided after Labor Day that he could reboot.
He couldn’t. By the end of the year, he was ready to jump on his own. He is fifty-five, a billionaire, a man comfortable in his own skin. He would stay a year as executive chairman, said an advisor, and then do something else. In the meantime, Larry Page, who read books on business as a young man, who at age twelve read a biography of Nikola Tesla and took away the lesson that it was not enough to be a brilliant scientist if you were not also a good businessman who controlled your inventions, had more aptitude for management than Sergey Brin. It was always assumed that one day Page would be C.E.O. Now that he is about to be, he will have to change. He is a very private man, who often in meetings looks down at his hand-held Android device, who is not a comfortable public speaker, who hates to have a regimented schedule, who thinks it is an inefficient use of his time to invest too much of it in meetings with journalists or analysts or governments. As C.E.O., the private man will have to become more public. And he will have to rid himself of a proclivity most engineers have: they are really bad at things they can’t measure. Like fears about Google’s size, and privacy and copyright and how to deal with governments that are weak at measurement but rife with paranoia.
Schmidt leaves behind an extraordinary company, and one that, despite the fact that Facebook is the flavor of the month or year, is producing annual revenues of close to thirty billion dollars (compared to Facebook’s reported two billion dollars). The knock on Google is that it is, in Steve Ballmer’s words, “a one-trick pony.” But it is no longer true that search is Google’s one trick. Google’s YouTube, which has a forty-per-cent market share of all Web videos, has started generating profits for the first time. Its Android operating system powers more smart phones than Apple’s iPhone, and, just as it took Google three years to monetize search, presumably they will find a way to get a slice of the advertising dollars or to sell the operating system. And Google’s display-advertising revenues have doubled. Many challenges assail Google and its new C.E.O., but Google—and Eric Schmidt—have more reasons to smile.
