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IT HAS been all change at the top of two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent tech giants this week. First Apple revealed that Steve Jobs, its boss, was
stepping away from day-to-day management responsibilities
... at the company to focus on an unspecified health problem. Then on January 20th Google said that Eric Schmidt, the firm’s chief executive, would hand over that role in April to Larry Page, one of the firm’s two co-founders. Mr Schmidt will become executive chairman, focusing on areas such as acquisitions and government relations, while remaining an advisor to Mr Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s other co-founder, who is going to concentrate on certain strategic projects. (Messrs Schmidt, Page and Brin, from left to right, are pictured above with one of their experimental self-driving cars).
The change makes sense, though arguably it should have happened sooner. As Google has grown from a start-up into a global powerhouse with 24,000 employees,
some of its original entrepreneurial spirit has been crushed
by a burgeoning bureaucracy. Several prominent Xooglers, as former employees of the company are known, have complained that it has become difficult to get things done at the firm. And rivals such as Twitter and Facebook have exploited this growing sense of frustration by pinching talented executives from Google’s ranks.
