Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page is stepping away from the day to day operations of Google as part of a major restructuring announced on Monday.
Google is vital to online merchants seeking traffic from exposure through organic and paid search as well as Product Listing Ads. But it’s uncertain how the corporate restructuring will impact sellers and buyers.
What is certain is that the core Google offering will have a new leader. Cofounder Larry Page is putting Sundar Pichai in charge while he himself runs the new parent company, called Alphabet, as CEO, with Sergey Brin as President.
Page does not intend for Alphabet to become a household name – instead, Alphabet will be a collection of companies with their own brand – such as Google and YouTube.
It’s unclear if Pichai may feel more pressure to monetize the new, slightly “slimmed down” Google further as Page and Brin focus on fostering new innovations and managing the portfolio of companies.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Pichai is Vice President of Product Management and has been with the company for over 11 years. While not a familiar name to most people, one of his biggest accomplishments at Google is well known: Google’s Chrome browser.
Last year, Fortune magazine called him a “little-known and soft-spoken middle manager,” who “has become a clear No. 2 to Google CEO Larry Page.”
The restructuring was a surprise, but it’s possible the breakup of eBay and HP could have been a factor. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company believes Google “has become more complex to manage as it pursues potentially big new businesses in industries far from Google’s search-engine roots.”
And, it reported, Page was said to have held up Berkshire Hathaway as a model for running a large, complex company.
