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发表于 2016-7-10 18:28:39
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Mr Schmidt told the Google Zeitgeist Europe event this week that Google was
still “very early in the total information we have” but the aim was to enable
“users to be able to ask questions such as: ‘What shall I do tomorrow?' and
‘What job shall I take?'”
Achieving that goal will require Mr Schmidt to navigate the delicate task
of avoiding the antagonism of rivals and sparking privacy fears from its
users.
For Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital and former
Google board member, Mr Schmidt can do that. “He is clearly a spectacular
ambassador to many different constituencies for Google. He has a calm and
unflappable demeanour, he has no particular need for the limelight, but the fact
is he has been a keystone that underlies the success of Google.”
Despite his role he remains the least famous of the Google triumvirate: the
greybeard (he is now 52) to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the more exuberant
youthful founders, now in their 30s.
Yet he is becoming the public face of the company, according to John
Battelle, author of The Search, a definitive account of Google's rise. “He is
the only one who has the executive experience to deal with the pressures of
leading a company that is constantly in the spotlight and it is probably
something that Larry and Sergey want as well.”
Mr Schmidt exudes a sober, buttoned-down, Brooks Brothers, executive style.
He comes over as a clear, articulate thinker, as engaged by questions about
Google's business strategy as futuristic, sociological questions of how the
internet will shape human behaviour. He speculated to an audience in Washington
in March, for example, “If MySpace gets a billion people does it get its own
government?”
He is a self-confessed political junkie, keenly aware of the power of
YouTube, the video site Google bought last year, to force transparency on
companies and politicians – as in the 2006 mid-term elections, when George
Allen, the Republican senator for Virginia, lost his race after a video with a
racist insult was posted on the site. When it comes to his own politics, Mr
Schmidt is more sensitive. He has made substantial donations to Democrats,
including $25,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2004,
but strongly denies this would “bias the activities of a $150bn corporation”. In
2006 he made no contributions.
That policy interest, says Hal Varian, a business professor at Berkeley and
Google adviser, stems from growing up around Washington and his father being an
economist. “He is an avid participant in the Aspen Institute and the World
Economic Forum.”
He was born in Washington, DC in 1955 and grew up in Virginia. He mowed
lawns in his teens for pocket money and liked to build furniture. In 1970, his
father rented a computer and he precociously rewrote its software. A degree in
electrical engineering at Princeton and masters in computer science followed,
leading to a job at the Xerox research centre in Palo Alto. He joined Sun
Microsystems and led development of its Java software and became its chief
technology officer in 1994. He left to become chief executive of Novell, the
networking company, before he joined Google as its chairman in March 2001.
“When he first came to Google, he said he was providing the adult
supervision, and I think there is still some truth to that,” says Mr Varian.
“There can be a lot of contributions around the table, but somebody has to forge
that consensus.”
Mr Brin and Mr Page were 27 when Mr Schmidt arrived, five years after they
founded Google in their Stanford dorms. Their AdWords, which displayed relevant
advertisements next to search results, was in its infancy. Mr Schmidt introduced
a 70-20-10 rule. Employees spend 70 per cent of their time on core business, 20
per cent on related projects and 10 per cent on new ones. “Larry and Sergey will
have a pet project they get really excited about, but Eric helps keep them
focused,” says Mr Varian.
It was also Mr Schmidt who saw Google through its rocky initial public
offering in 2004. This played on his “multilingual skills”, says Mr Moritz,
where he can communicate effectively with engineers, sales people and financial
analysts “with great charm and patience”.
“There was a lot of negativity on Wall Street around the IPO,” says Scott
Kessler, a Standard & Poor's equity analyst, but Mr Schmidt lent maturity to
a company seen as “an iconoclastic upstart that was intentionally different from
other companies”.
Google's shares have soared from $85 towards $500 amid strong revenues and
profits. According to the 2007 Forbes list of richest billionaires, Mr Schmidt
now ranks 117th, with a net worth of $6.2bn. Mr Page and Mr Brin rank joint
26th.
“It is hard to say how much of Google's amazing performance over the past
few years is the result of Eric's management skills compared to the stroke of
genius when they developed what has been one of the most successful products in
history,” says Henry Blodget, the former Wall Street analyst.
Yet while Mr Schmidt hails the birth of a new transparency afforded by
Google, he has been protective of his personal life, giving away scant details
other than that his hobby is flying; he flies a private jet once a week to the
east coast or to Europe.
For all his ease on Wall Street, Mr Schmidt must now use his charms on
corporate America. Google is starting to invade the traditional terrain of book
publishing, radio and television. The acquisition of YouTube led to a lawsuit
with Viacom, concerned about its growing power.
Google is aware of the dangers of a backlash. Yet Mr Battelle warns: “The
‘don't worry about it, trust us' line is wearing thin and the media industry is
not one to be trusting in the first place. Google has so many things in play and
one man alone cannot execute on that agenda. As the pressure grows, we may see
him backing off in some areas.” |
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