Posts Tagged ‘google under new management’
Last fall I wrote an article for the Theme Zoom blog about how I thought Google was dead, with Facebook moving into the realm of search and Google starting to copy Microsoft, it appeared to me that Google had become “established”, and was quickly falling into the ranks of gigantic corporate America, along with the likes of IBM.
However, the last couple of weeks has sparked the thought that this may not be the case. For those of you who have not heard, it was announced on Jan 20, 2011, that Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt will be resigning as CEO of Google in April and continue as the executive chairman.
The founders of Google, Larry and Sergie never gave up running the company, though Page handed off the CEO hat to Schmidt nearly a decade ago. Together the three of them manned the helm of the Google ship.
Now Larry Page has stepped back up to bring that huge ship back onto course. The goal, as stated by Brad Stone in Bloomberg, is to root out bureaucracy and rediscover the nimble moves of youth.
While 4th quarter profits for Google jumped 29% over last year, stock rose only 13.7% over the past 12 months, lagging behind the S&P’s 500 stock index.
Further, Google has lost serious ground to Facebook, who is now serving more display ads than either Google or Yahoo!, and is being visited by more US internet users. In reference to Google’s weekly meetings that bring project managers together to attempt to harmonize their disparate initiatives, there is talk of Vic Gundotra, who heads up Google’s secret project to combat Facebook.
Gundotra won’t say much about the initiative. Two sources familiar with it, who asked not to be named because the project is not yet public, confirm that it is tentatively called Google +1 and that it is designed to cull data about relationships among users from current services such as Gmail and YouTube.
Google will then let users share material through those connections, while using the information to make other products more social.
Search results may be skewed toward pages that your friends found useful—for instance, a Google Maps query for nearby Italian restaurants could return one that was positively reviewed by someone you know.
Google has realized more quickly than most companies that it needs to make changes to ensure it does not become its own obstacle to success. It will be interesting to watch how the changes progress and if Page’s vision for Google can be realized in the coming months.