“All politics is local,” said House Speaker Tipp O’Neill, meaning that every politician has to consider the effect that his or her positions will have on voters. What makes perfect sense on a national stage might be a disaster back in the district, where the actual voters live. And so it is, too, with big companies, where local impact is sometimes more important than national or international. Sometimes, in fact, companies can be completely re-routed solely to please or affect a single executive. I believe we are seeing precisely that right now at Google concerning Google X.
Google X is that division of the search giant responsible for self-driving cars, Google Glass, and […]
This week I’m at NASA’s Green Flight Challenge in our new home town of Santa Rosa, California. It’s a contest for efficient flight using alternative energy that I’ll be writing more about later in the week. Much of the $1.65 million in prize money comes from Google, the subject of this column. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Google’s strategic path under once-and-future CEO Larry Page and think I’ve got a couple things figured out. Google is right now in the process of changing, well, its process. Page is rebuilding the company but not doing a very good job of explaining himself, so I’ll just have to handle that here.
A few months ago I wrote 
No, Eric Schmidt didn’t step down from being CEO of Google to take Steve Jobs’s position at Apple. I’m fairly certain Schmidt was demoted. Or if he wasn’t, then he should have been.