Larry Page is surrounded. On one side, Google’s (GOOG) chief executive officer confronts Facebook, the social networking phenom that is about to go public. On his other side isApple (AAPL), which has moved the playing field off the desktop computer—Google’s fiefdom—and onto smartphones and tablets. Thus Page, who became CEO of Google a year ago, has the task of steering the company he co-founded through territory defined by two rivals while fending off accusations that his brainchild has become yet another lumbering monopolist or, worse, a follower.
Sitting for an April 3 interview at the Googleplex in
Mountain View, Calif., Page bridles at any suggestion that Google isn’t the
destiny-defining innovator it once was. He’s wearing geek business casual—fleece
jacket, logo shirt, jeans, black Converse sneakers. “Producing the best
[products] we possibly can for users is our paramount thing,” he says. “I think
we have demonstrated that over a very long period of time, with a whole variety
of different issues we’ve faced around the world.”
Page isn’t the first founder to reassert himself as leader
of the company he helped to create. There was Howard Schultz’s return to run
Starbucks (SBUX), which has worked out well, and Michael Dell’s reclaiming the
reins of his eponymous PC maker, which has not. For a still-young tech
entrepreneur such as Page, Steve Jobs’s triumphant homecoming at Apple in 1997
is the most obvious benchmark of success. Their situations aren’t totally
analogous—unlike Jobs, Page never left the company he founded. Though the
comparison is apt in one important way: In the 1990s, Apple needed a more
sophisticated operating system to navigate changes in the computing landscape,
and so bought Jobs’s company, NeXT. Today, Google also needs to figure out a new
world, in which its users increasingly see the Web through the lens of their
friends, instead of a cold, calculating algorithm. Although Google started
social networks such as Orkut in the last decade, Page acknowledges that the
company underestimated the power of friending. “Our mission was organizing the
world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful,” he says.
“I think we probably missed more of the people part of that than we should
have.”
Google’s tardy embrace of social networking and its other
moves, such as the strict terms it dictates to licensees of its Android
operating system, have opened the company up to the kind of criticism it rarely
encountered during its days as a mere colossus-in-the-making. Antitrust
authorities in the U.S. and Europe are investigating whether Google gives
preference to its own content in Internet search results instead of being a
neutral arbiter. Privacy watchdog groups are calling Google out on changes to
its privacy policies, charging that it has abused its users’ trust. Bloggers now
routinely wonder if the company is doing evil, a caustic play on Google’s famous
dictum in its 2004 initial public offering prospectus. A recent headline on the
technology site Gizmodo hyperbolically summed up the stew of distrust: “Google’s
Broken Promise: The End of ‘Don’t Be Evil.’”
Page smiles at the charge. Google, he insists, has not
really changed at all. “Our soul is the same,” he says. “What we’re about is
using large-scale technology advancements to help people, to make people’s lives
better, to make community better. If you look at the river of things we’re
doing, like automated cars and things like that, those things are fundamentally
about [using technology] to help people. And I think there is still a huge
amount of that to be done.”
With Sergey Brin, Page founded Google in 1998 at the age of
25. By any measure, the company is among the most remarkable in the history of
Silicon Valley, growing from a research project at Stanford to a
multibillion-dollar global behemoth in a little more than a decade. Yet by the
time Page took command last April, Google had grown unfocused and unwieldy. A
freewheeling atmosphere of invention and curiosity spawned countless unpolished,
unsuccessful products. (Take Google Buzz. No, really, take it!) The previous
CEO, Eric Schmidt, was spending much of his time on the road, focusing on the
company’s mounting problems with antitrust and privacy regulators and dousing
controversies such as the interception of home networking data by Google’s
roving, camera-equipped Street View cars.
An ongoing discussion among Google’s leaders about
refocusing the company around key product lines precipitated Schmidt’s decision
to step aside. Now Google’s executive chairman, Schmidt is still the public face
of the company at industry conferences and government hearings. Brin, Page’s
co-founder, works on futuristic technology products, such as augmented-reality
glasses. As CEO, Page handles the day-to-day decisions—and takes the blame when
things go wrong. “He’s probably working harder than anyone at Google right now,”
says Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of the group that makes the Chrome
browser.
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