Orderly succession
Google surprised everyone yesterday when, as well as reporting solid quarterly earnings, it announced that Eric Schmidt was stepping down as CEO.
This isn't anywhere near as dramatic as it might seem at first, however, as he's merely moving onto the role of Executive Chairman, from where he will focus on commercial and political relationships. Taking his place as CEO will be co-founder Larry Page, who will lead product development, while the other co-founder - Sergey Brin - will be in charge of working on new products.
"As friends, co-workers and computer scientists we have a lot in common, most important of all a profound belief in the potential for technology to make the world a better place," blogged Schmidt, who seems to view Google as some kind of philanthropic endeavour. "We love Google - our people, our products and most of all the opportunity we have to improve the lives of millions of people around the world."
Such is the way of things these days that Schmidt promoted his announcement by tweeting: "Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!" There followed a flurry of other tweets, which tech news tracker Techmeme has just started including in its results. Our favourite was from a US cnet writer that said merely: "Schmidt happens."
Onto the results, it was another good quarter for Google - beating analyst expectations. Revenue was up 26 percent on a year ago, while profit was up 29 percent. To put this into perspective, however, Google's $2.54 billion Q4 profit was still less than half Apple managed.
"Q4 marked a terrific end to a stellar year," said Schmidt. "Our strong performance has been driven by a rapidly growing digital economy, continuous product innovation that benefits both users and advertisers, and by the extraordinary momentum of our newer businesses, such as display and mobile. These results give us the optimism and confidence to invest heavily in future growth -- investments that will benefit our users, Google and the wider web."
You can see the full presentation and report below, apparently uploaded by TechCrunch. But before we leave Google, Mashable broke the news of a new product in development that is aimed at the local, social ‘deal of the day' market, which is growing rapidly and is currently dominated by Groupon, which Google reportedly failed to acquire late last year.
We've also embedded the Google Offers fact sheet, first published by Mashable, below.
