Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt is handing the reins of the company to co-founder Larry Page this spring, just a few months shy of a decade of being at the helm of what's become one of the world's most dominant tech companies.
When Schmidt joined the company's board of directors in March of 2001, Google was not yet synonymous with search, its search-advertising model was in its infancy, and it wasn't clear whether a power-sharing agreement with the company's two co-founders would actually work. By that August, he was CEO.
Ten years later, under Schmidt's leadership, the company is pulling in more than $25 billion in revenue a year, faces scrutiny from regulators over being a search and advertising monopoly and has more than 20,000 employees around the globe.
The triumvirate worked, evidently. And now with the change, the triangle remains in place, though in a new arrangement with Schmidt as Chairman of the Board, Page as CEO, and Sergey Brin as co-founder in charge of new initiatives.
Schmidt, whose background is in engineering, worked as the CTO of Sun and then as the CEO of Nortell, before Page and Brin invited him to be CEO. The hotshot programming duo were seeking adult supervision -- a not uncommon decision for startups on their way to becoming established businesses.
While many doubted that Schmidt, who favors a suit and tie, would mesh well with the laid-back, grad-school ethos established by Page and Brin, the trio reportedly had few major conflicts.
The most visible of these came over Google's rocky foray into China in 2006, where the company agreed to censor search results, so long as the company was free to tell users of its Google.cn site that some results were being withheld at the behest of China's Communist government.
Brin, who emigrated with his family from Russia in 1979 at age 6, was never comfortable with the deal. And, after the company's Chinese operations were hacked, Google all but blamed the Chinese government and Brin prevailed over Schmidt, leading the company to declare it would no longer run a censored search engine in China.
Schmidt shepherded the company through a very successful, if idiosyncratic, IPO in 2004, which went on a meteoric rise that's only been surpassed by Apple. Schmidt oversaw a wide range of acquisitions, including multibillion dollar purchases of YouTube and display-ad giant YouTube, as part of an only partially successful attempt to find new revenue streams for Google.
Other smaller acquisitions have had mixed success -- Grand Central successfully morphed into Google Voice, Blogger has stagnated, while Dodgeball, an early entrant in the local check-in market, died after being bought, only to see its founder leave and create FourSquare.
Over the last decade, Google has introduced a staggering range of products, some of which have failed (Knol, Google Answers, SearchWiki) and others that have become trendsetting leaders, such as Gmail and Google Docs.
Google has successfully turned its attention to the new world of smartphones, and in short order, its open-source Android OS has challenged Apple's dominant iPhone, ensuring that Google's search engine and text ads have a secure spot in the brave new world of ubiquitous handheld computers.
Schmidt exits the CEO job as Google tries to find its way into a new net paradigm established most forcefully by Facebook, where nearly all online services are becoming social. To date, Google's attempt at being "social" have largely floundered, with the exception of YouTube, which mostly runs as an independent entity.
But Schmidt's real role at Google was to be the grownup who knew how to run a big company and strike deals, know when to engage with policy makers, and how to handle international growth. And at that, he has proven to be quite capable, despite his recent tendency toward statements that turn into overblown news stories, such as his comment that in the future, Google will work on knowing what information to present you, without you having to search.
Now Page has to take over execution and he inherits the same problems that Schmidt was unable to solve, namely how can Google find a way to be less reliant on text ads and compete with a net that's increasingly being defined by the conventions of a Facebook generation.
Photo: Google CEO Eric Schmidt holds up his Google phone as he speaks at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Monday, Nov. 15, 2010.
Paul Sakuma /Associated Press
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