Larry Page's mission: Pulling Google out of midlife crisis
11/11/2011 12:45
Larry Page, Google's chief executive, so hates wasting time at meetings that he once dumped his secretary to avoid being scheduled for them. He doesn't much like email either - even his own Gmail - saying the back-and-forth takes too long to solve problems.
Page has never been more impatient than now. He is on a mission to pull Google through a midlife crisis that threatens to knock it off its perch as the coolest company in Silicon Valley.
Founded in 1998, Google is not yet 15, but in tech years, it is an aging giant that moves a lot slower than it did when it was a hot startup. It is losing employees to the new, hotter startups and is being pushed around by regulators and competitors like Facebook, Apple and Amazon, which are vying for people's online time.
So Page, Google's co-founder and former chief executive, who returned to the top job in April, is making changes large and small. He axed more than 25 projects, saying they weren't popular enough. He masterminded Google's biggest-by-billions-ever deal, the $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility bid, which poises the company to enter the hardware business. To read in detail visit Larry Page's Mission