In the 10 years since the last time Larry Page was Google’s chief executive, the company has changed a bit. It has gone from an ambitious start-up to a publicly-listed giant of the internet which generates cash and has 24 000 employees (and will probably have 30 000 by the end of the year); it has a stake in the fast-growing smartphone market, which barely existed; and it has also begun facing up to the changes inherent in being so large, one of which — the risks of bureaucracy — are well-known to most chief executives; the other — the threat of antitrust action in Europe and the US — are not.
As Page, who turned 38 last month, takes over the reins of the company again from Eric Schmidt, who announced in January he was stepping down, he knows he has to get those problems fixed. And although publicly Google is telling journalists “don’t look for dramatic or immediate changes”, Page has already begun tweaking the way that the company is organised and run in the three months he has had to prepare to take over fully.
That’s not to say that Google’s big visions (projects such as driverless cars or the Google BookScan project) are going away. Page is in many ways the ideal face to represent the company: he’s rather geeky, isn’t very outgoing, but is extremely smart.
And he’s bringing a number of changes to the company and how it runs.
Product and engineering managers have been asked to email him about their projects now under way, with a view to slimming them down: they were asked to describe their projects in 60 words or fewer, effectively getting them to pitch the ideas. He also spent parts of February and March touring the company and its outposts asking those managers about what problems they think they face in getting things done.
The detail of meetings — which can be the making or the death of a large company — has also been tweaked: attendees are told to pick a decision-maker and hold off working on their laptops during the meeting. (That would be something of a departure for Page, who — as the New Yorker writer Ken Auletta documents — once spent most of a meeting with IAC’s powerful Barry Diller with his head buried in his Palm PDA reading emails.)
Page has reinstated a form of the “weekly meeting” that Schmidt got rid of when he took over in 2001. That meeting had brought together the company’s (then rather fewer) top executives and allowed anyone to come up and query them about something. Schmidt felt it distracted from their work. Page clearly thinks it’s time it came back: he has announced that the divisional heads will be available in a central space each day in the iconic Building 43 of the main headquarters, so that if someone does have a pressing query, they’ll know when and where to find them.
Google isn’t going to be the “bottom-up” culture of past years, when someone like Paul Buchheit could knock together the prototype of Gmail in a single day (as happened in 2001) and then build it up by accreting engineers from other teams. (Buchheit also came up with the “Don’t Be Evil” motto that the company took to its heart.) Instead, a better model is how the Android platform has been driven, with a clear strategy (which despite claims to the contrary, has not diverged from its earliest intentions) driven by its lieutenants. The idea was never that Android would be an open-source project where absolutely anyone could make a phone, stick software in it, and call it “Android-powered”.
Instead Andy Rubin, who Google acquired in 2005 with the eponymously-named Android company, has been given his head by Page to make the phone system into a money-spinner for Google; its rise to the lead in the US and world smartphone markets, and the increasingly tight restrictions that Google is making on what tweaks can be made to the software, means that that could easily be achieved. Gene Munster of the analysts Piper Jaffray reckons that by next year there will be more than 130-million Android users worldwide, and that their viewing of ads on phones, plus other income sources (such as the Android Market for apps, where Google takes a 30% cut of any purchase, just like Apple) could generate more than $1-billion in straight revenue.
Data wil remain the most important decision-maker. Google once tried to figure out what the best shade of blue was to get people to click on hyperlinks. An in-house designer picked one shade; an engineer then showed the results of a small test which suggested another shade would do better. For Google, more clicks means more ad revenue — so it embarked on a huge test with millions of GMail users as guinea pigs in which it tracked clickthroughs as they were served very slightly different colours of blue. The data won — and the rebooted Google, with a computer scientist at its helm, will reiterate the importance of always following the data. It might not seem like an inspired way to do design. But Google is about size.
Doing something in the “social software” space remains an ambition at Google, but Page stands somewhat aloof from it. He isn’t on Facebook or Twitter (unlike Schmidt, who elliptically announced his departure on the latter). Google already has a long track record of failure in social software: Jaiku wanted to be Twitter, and wasn’t; Google Buzz was so dreadfully implemented (released to the wild after some limited testing in-house) that it led to lawsuits and Federal Trade Commission slapdowns that mean Google will have to tolerate oversight on its privacy policies for the next 20 years.
It’s possible that social software is simply a blind spot for a company whose culture is dominated by engineers and whose brand is built around search. It’s an oddity, because Google leapt to prominence a decade ago with the American public when they discovered that it wouldn’t just lead them to good factual answers, but that you could find out about potential dates and lovemates: “Googling” as a verb first appeared in a US paper at the end of 2000 when the New York Observer noticed that people used it to check out their upcoming dates because it could lead them to names. But Google has never managed to become a place where you connect with people — possibly because Page and Sergey Brin, its two inventors, designed it not as a destination but as a staging point on the web, your midpoint to whatever you were looking for.
The A-word — antitrust — might look like a headache for Page. The European Commission has sent out sets of three detailed questionnaires to advertising companies around Europe, asking about how well the online advertising market works and whether Google is behaving in an overly dominant way by using its heft to prevent others competing fairly (in antitrust lingo, this is known as “foreclosing the market”). The signals emanating from the EC suggest though that Google may escape this time — though its clearly preferential treatment of its own results, as has been highlighted by one of the principal complainants, the British search startup Foundem, may have to end.
Industry observers shook their heads at the irony of Microsoft weighing in on this last week, in which it filed an antitrust complaint to the EC, offering a more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone and acknowledging its own rocky antitrust past with the EC (which only stopped biting chunks out of it in 2004). Google may not have to adjust its behaviour too much. One thing that won’t change with Page’s ascent: the deeply felt antipathy inside Google towards Microsoft, which had already been the target of a sting earlier this year over search results, and with which Google is increasingly tussling for business contracts to offer cloud services such as email and document sharing.
In fact, it may be the fight with Microsoft that will define Page’s tenure more than the driverless cars or the potential dominace of Android. There’s no chance that Google will chip away at Microsoft’s principal monopoly, Windows, which generates roughly half the Redmond giant’s profits; the Chrome OS laptops Google is encouraging PC makers to build will be suitable only for a small group who live always-connected lives.
But if Google can start to undermine the Office monopoly, which generates the other half of Microsoft’s income, then it can begin to destabilise its ageing enemy. And at present, Microsoft remains the only company that can challenge Google on every front — smartphone operating systems, cloud services, search. – guardian.co.uk