Issue of the week: Google retools at the top

last updated 8 January 2015

“This is a big deal,” said Dan Gillmor in Salon.com. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was brought into the company in 2001 to provide “adult supervision,” has moved upstairs to serve as executive chairman. Co-founder Larry Page, who as CEO led the company to profitability in its early days, will reassume the CEO title. But the job has changed radically since Page last held the post. Google, a public company since 2004, has 24,400 employees—not the 200 Page oversaw during his first run. What’s more, today’s Google is facing serious challenges. Its responses to Facebook’s social-networking innovations have so far been “unpersuasive.” Meanwhile, complaints about the quality of Google’s search results are multiplying, and the company is losing the recruiting competition for hot young software engineers to Facebook. Page won’t tackle those challenges alone—Schmidt will handle partnerships and government relations, and co-founder Sergey Brin will likely serve as the resident “visionary.” But it’s Page, “more than anyone else, who decides whether the company’s best days are ahead.”

The change will wrench Page out of his comfort zone, said James Temple in the San Francisco Chronicle. Where Schmidt is at ease hobnobbing with corporate and government types, and Brin is “confident and engaged” in public, the intensely private Page is “shy, if not socially awkward.” During meetings—even with prominent backers like Internet mogul Barry Diller—Page barely lifts his eyes from the screen of his phone. He’s said to get along well with Google’s software engineers and computer scientists, but can be “brutally blunt” with non-techies. He’s going to have to prove he can summon the sophisticated communication skills necessary to articulate a vision and provide a “rationale of the company’s products and strategies.”

A bit less professional polish might benefit Google, said Mike Swift in the San Jose Mercury News. Schmidt has a reputation as a brilliant manager and a nice guy who lacks the ruthless streak needed to thrive in the tech industry. Unlike Schmidt, the “extremely smart and strong-willed” Page, who is said to be impatient with the slow pace of decision-making at Google, isn’t likely to let social and organizational niceties hinder the company’s efforts to “match fast-innovating rivals such as Facebook.” But the challenges facing Page are more than technological, said Ken Auletta in NewYorker.com. To meet them, he’ll have to shed “a proclivity most engineers have: They are really bad at things you can’t measure.” Concerns about privacy and copyright can’t be addressed by quantitative measures, nor can the “paranoia” of governments like China. Can a numbers guy learn the subtler side of the CEO’s job? For Google’s sake, he’d better.