The Google Shakeup

When is the best time to change CEOs if you’re a major company? How about shortly after announcing fourth-quarter earnings of $8.75 a share on revenue of $6.37 billion, numbers that shattered analysts’ expectations. Today, Google announced that CEO Eric Schmidt would be going into a new role and co-founder Larry Page would be ascending to the top position that he held in the beginning of the company a decade ago. Schmidt wrote about it in a blog post. “As Google has grown, managing the business has become more complicated. So Larry, Sergey, and I have been talking for a long time about how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making–and over the holidays, we decided now was the right moment to make some changes to the way we are structured.” Now is definitely the right moment, as it is clear that this was not a performance issue. Google is breaking every limit and exceeding every expectation that has been set for the search giant over recent years and the earnings report demonstrates that Schmidt wasn’t dropping the ball. Speculation is that this is a true streamlining, that Schmidt may have always needed to “get permission” for certain directions from the co-founders. If that’s the case, this is a move that will likely accelerate their meteoric growth.