The abrupt retirement/resignation/deck chair shifting of Google CEO Eric Schmidt couldn’t have been timed better — if you were Facebook. As dissected by the Gillmor Gang, the news of Larry Page’s reascension to the throne seemed just one more shoe dropping in the wake of Steve Ballmer’s axing of Bob Muglia, Steve Jobs’ step back to focus on his health, and other reboots from companies including HP, SAP, and I forget. Actually, mentioning HP and SAP served to bore me into stopping the last sentence.
The one connective tissue is the tectonic shift in technology caused by the iPad, or as @Scobleizer pointed out, the iPhone. Though @DannySullivan and @KevinMarks insisted on extolling the virtues of the free and open Web, there’s no doubt in my mind that Apple’s (and particularly Steve Jobs’) combination of design, control of a hungry niche marketplace, and political savvy adds up to a defining moment that rolls up media, technology, consumers, and the enterprise. And instead of running plays from their own playbooks, Apple’s competitors are working to undermine or dilute the impact of iOS.
Schmidt was not so much a victim of the Apple blitzkrieg as the notion of Google inevitability, or certainly invincibility. No one event or fumble seemed to add up to a reason for the firing, but rather there was the feeling of the absence of a strategy, a game plan, a vision if you must, of how to move beyond the lock on the world’s search market. It felt like the way the pioneers must have felt when they ran out of land at the Pacific Ocean. Cut off from China, shut down by the consumer electronics manufacturers with Google TV, and facing a developer base confused by old style jousting with Apple around H.264 and HTML 5, Brin and Page decided to graduate from middle school.
Whether Brin can nail social any more than he has tried for the last few years, or Page can soften up the media against his DNA, the striking question we had was not whether the Schmidt move was too radical but rather why not do the same thing with Ballmer. As @JTaschek ticked off the definition of what a modern CEO does in the Age of Facebook and Twitter, it occurred to me that both Google and Microsoft should look toward someone who comes from the the Industry Formerly Known as the Media to turn things around. Besides, Ricky Gervais is out of work.
Steve Gillmor is a technology commentator, editor, and producer in the enterprise technology space. He is Head of Technical Media Strategy at salesforce.com and a TechCrunch contributing editor. Gillmor previously worked with leading musical artists including Paul Butterfield, David Sanborn, and members of The Band after an early career as a record producer and filmmaker with Columbia Records’ Firesign Theatre. As personal computers emerged in video and music production tools, Gillmor started contributing to various publications, most notably Byte Magazine,...
Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. He is best known for his popular blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. Scoble joined Microsoft in 2003, and although he often promoted Microsoft products like Tablet PCs and Windows Vista, he also frequently criticized his own employer and praised its competitors like Apple and Google. Scoble is the author of Naked Conversations, a book on how blogs are changing...
Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade. Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline. Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they...
Kevin Marks is a software engineer. Kevin served as an evangelist for OpenSocial and as a software engineer at Google. In June 2009 he announced his resignation. From September 2003 to January 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 17 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati,...
John Taschek is vice president of strategy at salesforce.com. He is responsible for corporate product strategy, corporate intelligence and market influence. Taschek came to company in 2003, bringing over 20 years of technology evaluation experience. Taschek currently is also the editorial director for CloudBlog - an independent blog run as an adjunct to salesforce.com’s web properties. He occasionally is on Steve Gillmor’s The Gillmor Gang enterprise web video-cast. Previously, Taschek ran the testing labs at eWEEK (formerly PC Week) magazine....
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