Google CEO Larry Page Completes Major Reorganization

NEW YORK -- Google CEO Larry Page has promoted six executives to head key parts of the company in one of his first big moves since he took over the Internet search company on Monday. The management reshuffle is an attempt at streamlining a bureaucracy that's sometimes bogged down Google even as it became the world's most valuable Internet company.

Page, Google's 38-year-old co-founder, took over from Eric Schmidt, who is staying on as executive chairman. Page has made it a top priority to cut out the bureaucracy and speed up innovation at Google, which is facing threats from new startups, such as Facebook, Twitter and the online deals company Groupon.

These companies have built their success on "social," the buzzword that defines the latest generation of Internet icons. Google, whose bread and butter is online search, hasn't been all that successful in building up the social side of its products.

The six executives, all holding the title of senior vice president, are:

_ Andy Rubin, its top mobile executive;

_ Salar Kamangar, the head of video site YouTube;

_ Sundar Pichai, who's in charge of the Chrome browser and operating system effort;

_ Alan Eustace, senior vice president for engineering and research;

_ Vic Gundotra, who leads social ventures; and

_ Susan Wojcicki, who heads ads.

Some already had the senior vice president title before the latest change.

Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Capital, said the management changes are not surprising overall. But he said Page's decision to elevate "social" to make it a separate group on par with ads or search shows a clear concern over the threat from Facebook and others.

Google reports its first-quarter earnings Thursday.

Shares of Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., slid $1.54 to $578.46 in afternoon trading Friday.

Comments

[MyTake]

03:56 PM on 04/09/2011

Ah, the CEO neglected to appoint a VP in charge of NSA Data Transfer Division!

The House of Bilderberg pulled the "creepy" Herr Schmidt out of the CEO chair because he was attracting too much public criticism and people were finding out that he held Bilderberg membership.

Also holding Bilderberg membership is the Director of NSA. Schmidt and NSA hooked up at a Bilderberg meeting a few years back where they realized that they could put together a electronic Global Population Database.

Bush handed NSA the right to capture all phone, fax and email data passing through the big communications carriers in the U.S. and elsewhere. So NSA hooked their black boxes onto Google Servers to capture and merge everyone's internet transactions into their Data Farms. This created so much capacity that NSA had to build two new Data Farms in Idaho and Florida to handle it all and the American taxpayer got hosed over this illegal criminal activity.

All global crime starts right here in America!

[NWBrunette]

07:10 PM on 04/08/2011

Maybe now they can get to work on making their calendar notification feature actually work.

[Kuuba]

07:16 AM on 04/09/2011

Ya, you really want to keep Google up to date on everything that you do.

www.scroogle.org

[jmfree]

03:30 PM on 04/08/2011

This will be interesting. And possibly tragic.

In a very important sense, Google is in precisely the same position Yahoo has been in for many years: unable to find a second act.

And people laugh at Yahoo as a bunch of tech losers who are "so yesterday".

Google has tried to compensate by inventing and giving away stuff left and right to keep up the image of the Great Innovator. Google Maps is terrific, YouTube universally used, and GMail not bad at all. But none of these are businesses. They are more like public charity projects. OK, fine. I can give away pencils on the street. That's easy.

Yes, Larry's great ideas are admirable (at least the ones that have survived, which isn't many). And maybe he is too.

But some quote about deck chairs comes to mind.

[YoBear]

10:09 AM on 04/08/2011

Headline should read "Google Searches for New Calling"

[tomjones]

07:56 AM on 04/08/2011

Will he fix AdSense? digitalundivide.com

[wonmean]

07:57 PM on 04/08/2011

What's wrong with it?

Also, your website needs a clean-up and less ads.
And the actual content in bigger fonts so that the ads don't swamp your reader.