Eric Schmidt Says Google Would Love to Replace Microsoft as Yahoo!'s Search Partner

No one is reporting that Eric Schmidt said overnight in Tokyo that Google would love to be Yahoo!'s search partner again.

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Apple's 10 Biggest Mistakes Since Steve Jobs Returned

Apple has made an almost perfect string of decisions since Steve Jobs returned to the company in the 90s. What are its 10 biggest mistakes over that time period?

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Eric Schmidt Doesn't Believe For A Second That Siri Is A Threat To Google

Despite making a big deal about it on Friday in his answers to the US Senate, you shouldn't think Eric Schmidt or any Google exec is fretting yet about Siri as a threat - even though they should.

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Stop Bitching About Apple's Board

Why do we constantly hear complaints about Apple's board when Google's goes whistling past the graveyard? Seen their 5 year stock returns?

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It's Official: Eric Schmidt Is Pathological

Eric Schmidt has some explaining to do over his attempt to portray a great relationship with Steve Jobs, given what Jobs just said in his book.

Read the Full Post here in Forbes

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What Is Up With Eric Schmidt's Revisionist History of His Relationship With Steve Jobs?

Eric Schmidt has been doing the talk show circuit since Steve Jobs died insisting the two men were close friends. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

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All Quiet on the Google Front

By Eric Jackson RealMoney Contributor 6/2/2011 12:15 PM EDT Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

We're now two months into the reign of Larry Page as the CEO of Google (GOOG -commentary - Trade Now) and, unless you count his canned comments at the start of the April earnings call, we've yet to hear him speak publicly about the company.

There hasn't even been a quick comment like, "I'm conducting a thorough assessment of all Google operations and will soon report on my strategy for the company." Nothing.

Instead it's been left to his lieutenants and his old boss to make the only public statements about what life is like under Larry. "It's invigorating," said Marissa Mayer a couple of weeks ago, comparing a day working at Google to a whiff of Irish Spring in your morning shower.

"Larry, of course, is brilliant," said Eric Schmidt earlier this week at the D conference in Los Angeles, in his first speech since taking the role of "Executive" Chairman (meaning, "I'm still working, I'm not just golfing, OK?"). Of course, Larry's brilliant. Why would anyone even think of questioning his brilliance?

Since brilliance is the only prerequisite for capable CEO leadership, perhaps we should nominate Stephen Hawking to take over from Carol Bartz at Yahoo! (YHOO - commentary - Trade Now). Or what about a brain surgeon as the next head of General Electric (GE - commentary - Trade Now)? That's the problem with business today: There's not enough brilliance.

Maybe Wall Street wouldn't have almost blown up two years ago if only we had had more brilliant people working there.

Being a leader is about more than brilliance. Look, it's important. I'd rather have a smart guy running a company than a dummy, but it's about inspiring others, execution, long-term planning and short-term firefighting. Larry Page is still a huge unknown quantity, and that uncertainty going to continue to hang over this company's stock.

I don't know if it will be on the next earnings call or at some investment banking conference, or maybe not until next year's D conference (this year's would have been the obvious one to attend and speak at ... and I'm sure he was invited), but eventually Larry Page will have to get up and speak out like every other CEO does.

When that day comes, buckle up for a stock drop. I continue to be convinced that the stock will sell off as investors better appreciate who is in charge now. "This is the guy?" will be a common reaction.

...

[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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A Meandering Google

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
5/9/2011 10:45 AM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

Did you catch the new Google (GOOG -commentary - Trade Now) television commercials over the weekend? No, I don't mean the ads for a new Google TV service that's supposed to go up against Apple (AAPL - commentary - Trade Now) TV. I mean actual ads for Google during weekend sports telecasts.

I've seen a couple now. They always drive you back to a sign-up page to download the Google Chrome browser, but the ads are basically selling you on the total Google experience: checking your email through Gmail all day, uploading user-generated videos to YouTube and sharing your photos on Picassa.

This advertising didn't come as a total surprise to me, as I had heard on the last earnings call for Google (Larry Page's infamous first call as CEO) that they were raising the marketing spend for Chrome. However, I somehow expected that they would be spending this money online, in a targeted way, rather than a shotgun old-media ad-buying approach.

It leads you back to the question of just what Larry Page is doing as the CEO of Google. He's now about a month and a half into his tenure, and probably more like five months from the point at which he knew he would be taking over.

Here's what we know, based on various reports:

• He believes Facebook is the biggest threat to Google, but there's not much happening with Google and social networking. Remember "+1?" Wasn't that supposed to be the service that every Google employee would get all his or her friends and family to start to using and hope for a group bonus at the end of the year? Did +1 ever launch? Larry -- to my knowledge -- also doesn't have a Facebook page or Twitter handle.
• Page is willing to spend whatever it takes to get or keep talent at Google. Whether it's an extra few million in stock options to counter talent being lured away, or across-the-board 10% pay hikes for all employees, Larry is willing to pay up for the long-term good. That's partly why operating expenses were up 43% last quarter.
• Google is now advertising itself during major TV sports events. They want the same viewers who drink Miller Lite and order Papa John's Pizza (PZZA - commentary - Trade Now) to create a Gmail account and start videoing themselves for their 15 minutes of fame on YouTube. This would seem to be the opposite of the approach which they took to revolutionize the advertising business with their Google AdWords. Forget the targeted approach; go mass media and let's see how many fish we can catch.
• There's no real change in Google's strategy or, at least, there's no real articulation for where the company wants to go. We know Page is in a hurry to get somewhere, but we're not really sure where that is and how it differs from where Eric Schmidt was leading the company.
• Pet projects will apparently continue. Driverless cars, wind turbine farms in Oregon and future space missions are still, it seems, part of the broader Google strategy -- until we hear otherwise.

With these messages coming out in slow drips from the Googleplex, it is hard for investors to get excited.

...

[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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Dear Larry: A Letter From Wall Street

By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor04/27/11 - 08:00 AM EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) --

Dear Larry:

What happened?

There was a time -- just before you IPO'ed in 2004 -- when we really thought Google(GOOG_) was a kooky company. You put that strange letter to shareholders in your S-1. You said you wouldn't pay attention to the short-term demands of Wall Street. You set up a dual-class share structure so that none of our activist hedge fund brothers could throw you out if you did a terrible job. You said you were going to be a different kind of company.

We don't like different. It's hard to figure out. It's random. Worst of all, it suggests your margins are going to suck.

Google CEO Larry Page

Luckily, Eric Schmidt won us over. He was very articulate, if not a little professorial. He seemed to listen to our concerns and communicate back to us in a way that conveyed understanding and serious intent. In short, we liked him and our confidence was bolstered by your results since IPO.

However, since you pushed Eric out so that you could retake the CEO title, we're a little freaked out.

All those early fears of ours about a bunch of kids running this company in some haphazard way came back to us. The day you made the announcement that you were taking over for Eric, you released a picture of you, Sergey and Eric sticking your heads out of a Prius that drives itself around the Google parking lot. Driverless cars? That's in the Google R&D budget?

More recently, we've read that you're investing in wind farms in Oregon. Hundreds of millions of dollars in wind farms. Your recent quarter's results showed operating expenses up 40% because you gave everybody one-time 10% pay hikes across the board.

In short, we're seeing lots of spending and it's not at all clear how this is going to benefit us -- the shareholders.

We know you call us Wall Street people and you look down on us. You think because we're not engineers or Rhodes Scholars that we're not as smart as you. You think we're slick guys in flashy suits who don't deserve what we're paid. You put us down in private -- until you need our money.

.......

[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]

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What Was Larry Page Thinking on Yesterday’s Earnings Call?

Larry Page's first earnings call last night was a disaster. If you want to be CEO, you have to lead.

Read my full post on Forbes.

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Wall Street Journal China Opinion: 佩奇能胜任谷歌掌门人吗？

My take on the challenges Larry Page faces as CEO of Google.

傑克森專欄

谷歌聯合創始人佩奇重新擔任谷歌CEO，他雖是技術天才，但沒有誰指導過他如何成為稱職的老板，他將不得不摸著石頭過河。很多人在這種情況下都會犯錯，不管他們有多優秀。

Read the entire column from Wall Street Journal China here.

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How Things Will Shake Out for the Rest of Google’s Management Team

There's been lots of speculation about who's in and who's out at Google under Larry Page. I weigh in with my views.

Read my full post at Forbes.

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Don’t Own Google for Next Six Months

Larry Page is taking over as CEO from Eric Schmidt on April 4th. He's likely to struggle in the first 6 months of the job as he learns the ropes of being the public face of Google.

Read my full post at Forbes.

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Who's Running Google's China Strategy?

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
3/21/2011 4:00 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

What is Google (GOOG - commentary - Trade Now) thinking in terms of its China strategy?

It was exactly a year ago, in March of 2010, that reports started circulating saying Google would leave China over hacker attacks and China's attempts to limit free speech on the Internet. A few weeks later, Google pulled its servers off the mainland and placed them in Hong Kong.

Looking at the 12 months since then, I would have to say that that decision was a complete failure.

Google's share of searches in China dropped to 27% last summer, down from 36% prior to the pull-out. The prime beneficiary has been China's top search engine, Baidu (BIDU - commentary -Trade Now), which saw its market share rise to 71% from 68% over the same period.

Google's share price has fallen 2% to $569 a share in that time. Meanwhile, Baidu's U.S.-traded shares have more than doubled, from just below $60 a share to $120.50 at the close Friday.

At the time of the pull-out from China, both of Google's co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, supported the move. Reading the psycho-social tea leaves, it appears that Brin was replaying the childhood trauma of his family fleeing the pre-Glasnost Soviet Union for America in pushing Google to leave China.

As Brin tells it in a recent interview at a TED conference, the decision to leave China was easy:

"We'll do as much as we can, but we don't want to run a service that's politically censored. We're not talking about porn and gambling, things like that, but really the political stuff. ... I want to find a way to really work within the Chinese system and provide more and better information. So, I think a lot of people think I'm naive, and that may well be true, but I wouldn't have started a search engine in 1998 if I wasn't naive in that way. ... Perhaps we won't succeed immediately, tomorrow or not, but we will in a year or two. ... Our focus has really been what's best for the Chinese people. It's not been about our particular revenue or profit or whatnot."

According to some reports, Google's decision to leave China led to some conflict between the co-founders and CEO Eric Schmidt. Though not the only reason, it is perhaps part of the reason why Larry Page decided to assert himself and take over the leadership of Google starting next month.

The recent action in Google's stock since that leadership announcement suggests that the market is still uneasy about Page's ascension and whether he will be a boost to the stock or an inexperienced and undisciplined leader.

...

[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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Video: The Power Behind Google's Throne: Shona Brown

Contributor Eric Jackson says watch for Google (GOOG) SVP of Business Operations, Shona Brown, to wield some major influence now that Larry Page is taking over as CEO from Eric Schmidt. Brown co-authored the 1998 book "Competing on the Edge" about how the ideal tech companies need a balance of entrepreneurial zeal with proper organizational structure.

Wed 01/26/11 08:30 AM EST -- Eric Jackson

Stocks in this video: GOOG

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The Power Behind Google's Throne

By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor01/26/11 - 06:00 AM EST

NEW YORK (TheStreet) - When I was a struggling Ph.D. student 10 years ago or so, my advisor was good friends with a revered professor of strategy and organization from Stanford: Kathy Eisenhardt.

Although Kathy's written countless academic articles on the subject and strategy and competing in ultra-fast industries, she's not a professor in the Business School at Stanford, but in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management.

In 1998, she gave a talk at Columbia about a new book she co-authored with her doctoral student at the time. The book was called Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. The co-author was Shona Brown. Today, Brown is the senior vice president of business operations atGoogle(GOOG_). And with last week's news that Larry Page would talk over running Google in April from Eric Schmidt, Shona Brown's importance at Google just increased significantly.

So, who is Shona Brown? Like most people at Google, she's brilliant by normal standards. The Canadian, who majored in computer science at college, was selected as a Rhodes Scholar. She decided that she wanted to work with Kathy Eisenhardt at Stanford in the mid-1990s and graduated with a Ph.D. in strategy and organization from the Engineering School.

At Stanford, with Einsenhardt who was well-known and well-regarded by tech companies in the Valley, she got involved in many interesting side consulting engagements. Instead of opting for the academic path after graduation, she decided to pursue consulting. She went on to be a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in Toronto, where she worked with Patrick Pichette, who -- like her -- was also a Rhodes Scholar and was working at McKinsey at the time Brown joined. He would later go on to become an executive at Canada's largest phonecompany, Bell Canada.

At McKinsey, Brown began working with Google and its senior executives and founders on the ideas discussed in her book. To boil the book down, the co-authors discuss how companies, especially tech companies, seem to do better when they strike the right balance between organizational structure (clear roles/processes) and entrepreneurial dynamism (e.g., reacting to some instant news in the market or environment instead of being too bureaucratic to react).

.......

[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]

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Video: Larry Page's Zuckerberg Envy Not Good for Google

Contributor Eric Jackson says Larry Page pushed out Eric Schmidt as Google CEO because of Mark Zuckerberg envy. Zuckerberg defied conventional wisdom and remained CEO instead of steeping aside for someone with gray hair. Page, who senses Google is falling behind, thinks he can recharge the company. There's a lot of risk for investors with this unknown quantity at the top. Eric owns AAPL.

Tue 01/25/11 10:00 AM EST -- Eric Jackson

Stocks in this video: GOOG | AAPL

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Turning the Page at Google

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
1/24/2011 5:04 PM EST
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

My first reaction to the news on Thursday that Google (GOOG - commentary - Trade Now) co-founder Larry Page would be taking over as the CEO from Eric Schmidt starting April 1 was that it was a negative for the stock in the short term.

This was counter to the initial jump in the stock in the response to the strong quarterly results. The stock initially bounced from $626 at the close of Thursday to $644 about 45 minutes after the news broke about Schmidt's departure from the top job. Those who were bullish on the stock were making the case that a strong company trumps the importance of the CEO.

Although I agree with the power of a group over any one individual or leader, a CEO carries significant weight for investors when looking at a public company. Although Google is a known company -- now public for over six years -- the price action in Google on Friday suggested that people are nervous about Larry Page's ascension.

If you sold your Google stock immediately at the open on Friday, you got $640 for the stock. It immediately dropped below that and didn't stop all day. It closed below $612 by the time Friday's session was over.

What does the market have to fear from Page leading the company? The hundreds of profiles about him describe him immediately as "smart." They say that "he's always been interested in the business" -- that's supposed to be a selling point? They say that he's driven and that he has always admired Apple (AAPL -commentary - Trade Now) co-founder Steve Jobs. And Schmidt and former IPO banker and Google employee Lise Buyer have gone out of their way to say that this succession has always been planned and that Page was always slated to take the top job.

I don't know Larry Page, haven't met him and have barely ever heard him speak, aside from his brief comments on Thursday's earnings call. (Is it unreasonable to expect that the new head of a $200 billion company would stick around longer than 10 minutes to answer questions, including the bland comment, "I'm incredibly excited about the possibilities to come"?)

...

[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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Google's CEO Switch Raises Many Questions

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
1/21/2011 11:30 AM EST
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

Last night's surprise announcement that Google (GOOG - commentary - Trade Now) Co-Founder Larry Page would take the CEO post from Eric Schmidt on April 1 caught everyone off guard.

A few years ago, Schmidt had talked about the "troika" of him, Page and Sergey Brin working together for the next 20 years. And the market seemed to like that because Google had been extremely successful up to that point. The thinking was, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The stock is up today because of Google's strong earnings last night, but I believe there could be trouble ahead for the company based on this move.

Google used to be thought of as unassailable in ads. It perfected AdWords, which revolutionized the media world over the last 10 years. However, it has had a hard time leveraging that success into other businesses.

There are some areas of real promise. Google is starting to fire on all cylinders in the display segment, where it used to trail Yahoo (YHOO) badly. This improvement is also helping Google to take advantage of the YouTube acquisition. YouTube still dominates the user-generated space and Google hopes to expand its uses to include professionally streamed content as well. Meantime, Android phones are helping ensure that Google will play a central role in the mobile world. Just yesterday, the company said it is now activating 300,000 Android devices a day.

But Google faces a huge challenge from Apple (AAPL - commentary - Trade Now) in the mobile market. Steve Jobs recently said that users interact with ads very differently on mobile devices than on computers. If true, this could greatly hurt the cash cow AdWords business.

Facebook has also made Google's attempts to build up a social networking business (remember Wave?) look silly.

Despite the Google troika's valiant efforts yesterday to make it sound like this transition is the culmination of years of planning, I don't buy it. Schmidt admitted yesterday that internal decision-making issues at Google have hindered the company's ability to respond to competitive threats in recent years.

...

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Google's Turning Point

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
10/18/2010 5:30 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

Google (GOOG - commentary - Trade Now) earnings last Thursday were a turning point for the company. Even after Friday's big 10% bump up in price, the stock is still down 3% for the year. Negativity has surrounded the company for most of the year -- some of it deserved, in my view, because of missteps (like Google's awkward and ill-advised withdrawal from China in the spring), and some of it not.

The concern for investors for much of the year -- aside from the whole China kerfuffle -- has been whether Google is just a one-trick pony.

Sure, it's been a hell of a pony, but investors have been wondering if Google could leverage its dominance in text ads for search into other areas. The company has thrown a lot of pasta against the wall over the years -- everything from Google Wave to Orkut to its $1.6 billion acquisition of YouTube a few years back - but not a lot has stuck in terms of meaningful profits... at least, not yet.

So, what was so eye-catching about Thursday's earnings call was that Google decided to give some specific data on its key new areas of growth.

The key stats revealed by the company were that:

The mobile business is contributing more than $1 billion annually in revenue (calculated by taking the last quarter's revenues and annualizing them)

Display advertising (as a result of the Double-Click acquisition a couple of years ago and the YouTube display ads) is contributing more than $2.5 billion annually in revenue (calculated using the same methodology as mobile)

More than 2 billion YouTube videos are viewed each week

What also seemed to surprise analysts on the upside was a drop in Google's TAC (traffic acquisition costs) in the quarter. Google is no longer paying News Corp's (NWS - commentary - Trade Now) MySpace for traffic under a very lucrative (for MySpace) agreement, struck a number of years ago when MySpace was still the big dog of the social-networking space.

So, the market is starting to sit up and take notice of Google again in the last two days. And why not? These metrics are important indicators of the company's future success.

The area that intrigues me most -- as a long holder of GOOG -- is mobile. This $1 billion in revenue is all from mobile ads. Google is still in a land-grab mode with Android. It continues to give away the operating system for free to carriers in order to drive adoption. And that is certainly working, as Android has grown from nothing to major mobile player in the last year. Many expect it to surpass Apple (AAPL - commentary- Trade Now) in terms of mobile market share soon, as it is now part of so many devices.

...

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