Eric Schmidt steps down as Alphabet executive chairman: what next for Google?

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is stepping down after a 17-year run with the two firms but will carry on in the capacity of technical adviser, it was announced yesterday.

The 62-year-old billionaire will remain on the board of the company, which was “formed to contain Google and its sprawling so-called moonshot subsidiary businesses in 2015”, says the San Francisco Chronicle.

Schmidt “has played a key role in the development of Google from a small California start-up to the global business it is today”, says BBC News.

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The tech tycoon said that along with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai, he believes that “the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition”.

Page and Brin will continue to head up Alphabet and will retain voting control, but the shift underlines how “a new generation of leaders is firmly in charge at the giant company”, according to The New York Times. The newspaper says that “Schmidt’s stepping back is expected to have little practical effect on the day-to-day operations of the behemoth operation”.

In terms of a successor, the inclusion of Pichai in Schmidt’s statement, alongside the names of Page and Brin, “was seen as a passing of the torch and the creation of a new power triumvirate”, the paper adds.