The search giant's chief has scored a success with the Android smartphone platform, but can he beat Facebook with Google+?
Job: chief executive, Google
Age: 38
Industry: digital media
Turnover: $29.32bn
Staff: 26,316
Salary: $1
Worth: $16.3bn
2010 ranking: 2 (shared with Sergey Brin)
"Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!" wrote Eric Schmidt of Google in what seemed another elliptical tweet in January. But the meaning was explained a few hours later as Google published its quarterly results and Schmidt announced that he was stepping aside as chief executive, a role he had held since 2001, in favour of Larry Page.
Page had been chief executive in the company's formative days, running it with co-founder Sergey Brin until the venture capitalists determined that they needed "adult supervision".
Becoming chief executive on his own, rather than as part of a triumvirate structure with Schmidt (now just chairman), and Brin (now in charge of longer-term projects), Page has tried to instil a new sense of direction into the company that became a synonym for "searching the internet". Google had 92% of all searches in the UK in June, pushing Microsoft's Bing down to 3%.
Google's ambitions remain enormous. Its stated mission is to "organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and it keeps on being successful. The Android smartphone platform went from a standing start at the end of 2007 to be the market leader by the first quarter of this year. Only Apple's iPhone can seriously challenge it in terms of apps.
The company continues to dominate internet search, and to account for ever larger chunks of internet advertising. It has surpassed ITV as the biggest recipient of advertising in the UK, and in the year to December it had revenues of $29bn, on which it made profits of $8.5bn – up from $23bn and $6.5bn respectively last year. Newspaper proprietors seem to have given up on their complaints that Google is a leech that sucks up their advertising business and only feeds them a few visitors in return.
Google has also been taking on Microsoft on its own ground, first with its Chrome browser (with 20% of market share, challenging Internet Explorer) and now with its Chromebook, a slimmed-down PC that doesn't run Windows, but instead uses Chrome as a window on the world and only works via a Google account.
The company has not, however, had it all its own way. It has not yet managed to click with social media in the way that Facebook and Twitter have, though it is trying again with Google+, which may yet be a success. Many early adopters like it, but that doesn't mean it will pull people away from the attractions of Facebook. Google TV has gone almost nowhere since its 2010 launch. It is not clear whether it has been consigned to a backburner as more important matters come to the fore, or has run into the immovable obstacle of the TV networks being unwilling to let their content go out over the internet and have Google sell adverts against it. The Google Wave experiment was shut down and tablets based on Android are yet to take off - though developers are hopeful that like smartphones, they soon will.
But the biggest threat comes from regulators. In the US, the FTC is investigating whether Google favours its own properties in searches. Google faces the same investigation in Europe – though that also involves advertising. It may not be a "Microsoft moment" comparable to the breakup threat that Bill Gates had to fend off in 2000, but it is a testing time for Google, and the way in which Page pilots the company through it will be a measure of his maturity.
This is only the second time since 2006 that Google has not been represented at the very top of the MediaGuardian 100. Schmidt topped the poll in 2007, but last year Steve Jobs of Apple took over. Now it is Zuckerberg, the nerdy college kid who has come to look like Page's and Brin's nemesis.
Brin and Page, who met at Stanford University in 1995, founded Google three years later in a garage in California rented to them by Brin's future sister-in-law. Schmidt joined the company in 2001, and by 2006 the verb "to google" had entered the Oxford English Dictionary.
The pair put 1% of the company's annual profits into Google.org, their "technology driven philanthropy arm", and have invested heavily in alternative energy research. Moscow-born Brin has also invested heavily – to the tune of $5m – to secure a seat on the inaugural Soyuz space tourist flight to the international space station.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/24/larry-page-mediaguardian-100-2011
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