While no one is pointing the finger directly, it is possible that Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) flailing foray into TV entertainment--Google TV--was the final straw that broke chief executive Eric Schmidt's back. While the Silicon Valley saw the move as a step in the direction of the establishment, the establishment saw it as impudence from an outsider. In short, neither side was happy and Schmidt, as the face of the firm, was left exposed.
Schmidt, brought in to run the tech firm a decade ago, stepped down from that position, although he remained executive chairman. Larry Page, the search giant's co-founder stepped in with the goal of taking what's become a corporation, in the worst connotation of that term, and giving it "nimbleness and soul and passion and speed of a start-up," he told the New York Times.
Google TV is not the only warning sign that the company is joining the bureaucracy-ridden world of telecommunications rather than slinging outrageous arrows in its direction. It's also fallen behind social networks like Facebook (which got its own movie while Google couldn't even get its own TV) and Twitter in the minds and eyes of the younger audience. Perhaps most telling, the articlesaid, "The unspoken fear within Google is that it could become like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT)."
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