I believe Eric Schmidt is stepping down because he believes doing so is what is best for Google. And I believe his reason has little to do with whether or not he thinks that he is the right person for the job or that Larry Page is the better candidate.<p>I think Eric believes that it is time for Google to get a real CEO because he has been the CEO in name only.<p>C is for Chief and Eric was never the chief since he was not the person who gets to make the final decision.<p>E is for Executive and Eric never spends much time executing because he was too busy herding cats.<p>O is for Officer and Eric was not able to look out for the interest of all the shareholders, just the two largest ones.<p>Good luck, Larry.
The one sentence answer is that Google is no longer the top dog, and he doesn't seem to have the steam to weather through the storm. I feel like after the whole Google/Verizon deal, the writing was on the wall.
Much as I despise Google's Minority Report style vision for the future where personalised advertising is plastered all over everything, and their evil actions regarding privacy...<p>... and much as I am allegedly a huge Apple fan ...<p>I still think it is unfair for people to compare the effectiveness of Eric by comparing Google's performance to Apple's performance.<p>Google is operating in a mostly saturated market (online search and advertising) in which they have a Microsoft style almost total monopoly. You just <i>don't</i> get spectacular growth numbers in those scenarios. Doesn't mean you can't squeeze the monopoly position to make great profits of course, but those profits aren't going to increase exponentially year after year without cease.<p>Apple on the other hand has been recently expanding into new markets (okay, some older ones too, and some borrowed and some blue) at an enormous rate. People laughed at them when they said they would enter the phone market. People laughed at them when they said they would enter the tablet market.<p>In fairly short order, they've totally disrupted <i>and defined</i> those two markets. Now personally I believe that their dominance in those markets will be short lived, but I think they will continue to lead the direction of those industries long after their market share has dropped below 10%.<p>Google's done what? They have a really nice e-mail service... but apart from that and the search/advertising thing what do they do? Oh, they bought youtube and slapped ads all over it... yeah... great work guys, but not exactly what I'd call innovative. Oh, they have a browser and a smartphone... but again not especially innovative.<p>I dunno, I just expected <i>more</i> from the 20% time of a bunch of PhDs sitting around?