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.
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.
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.
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