Larry Page Replaces Eric Schmidt As the Google CEO

Yesterday, Google announced its quarterly results. Well, nothing unusual there. Rise in earnings, rise in profits, rise in number of employees around the world…so, overall, the same story that’s been going on every 3 months since Google started announcing them.

But that wasn’t all. Google also announced something that wasn’t expected. Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer(CEO) wrote a detailed blog post where he told every one that he would be stepping down as the CEO of Google to let Co-founder Larry Page take his place.

Here’s one interesting excerpt from Schmidt’s post that almost every one in the tech industry seems to be talking about at the moment.

And as our results today show, the outlook is bright. But as Google has grown, managing the business has become more complicated. So Larry, Sergey and I have been talking for a long time about how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making—and over the holidays we decided now was the right moment to make some changes to the way we are structured.

Notice the words, “speed up decision making.” It has been long speculated that in the past few months (or may be years), all the major strategic decisions were mainly driven by the co-founders – Larry and Sergey. Many of the decisions which Eric wanted to take were vetoed by them, who also happen to own a bigger stake in the company, in board meetings. It is important to note that Page and Brin have veto power over everyone else in Google’s board ( read this for more on how they used it on one such occasion. )

I guess they decided that Larry better call the shots from the forefront instead of Eric dealing with day-to-day stuff despite not having complete control over strategic affairs. So, from now on, Larry is the Google CEO, Sergey remains as a Co-founder and Eric will be the Executive Chairman (no he is not leaving Google anytime soon. )

I hope it’s all for good, and together the “triumvirate”, as Eric likes to call their group in his post, helps Google create better products.