Sergey Brin And Larry Page Give Sundar Pichai Control Of Google And Alphabet

The Co-Founders of Google are taking a step back. Alphabet has declared that Sergey Brin and Larry Page are stepping down as the respective President and CEO of the firm, with Sundar Pichai (the Google CEO) taking the lead at both firms effective immediately. Brin and Page will still be engaged as board members, co-founders, and shareholders, but they are handing over their leadership jobs in a long while for the first time.

The two outgoing officials clarified this as a “natural time” to rationalize management now that Alphabet is “well-settled” and its different brands (comprising Google) are working smoothly as sovereign companies. Google and Alphabet just do not require a President and two CEOs, Brin and Page claimed. They pointed to Pichai as a logical selection considering both his “confidence in the value and his extensive experience of the Alphabet structure.”

In different words, Pichai is doubtful to toss out the current formula. Alphabet will carry on relying majorly on cloud services, search, Chrome, and Android, all the while expanding with more adventurous efforts such as Waymo and Loon.

With that claimed, the management shake-up arrives at a difficult time. Google workers have blamed the firm for cracking down on employee organization, taking a lax approach toward sexual harassment, and otherwise being insensitive to employee concerns. It is also struggling with weighty problems such as accusations of bias and political ad integrity. These issues are not going away now that Pichai has more authority—he will just have a heavier workload.

On a related note, for all the enhancements made by robot firms, we are still long behind from having bots living amongst us and doing assistive jobs in our daily lives. Alphabet is taking on this challenge via X Lab, where employees are collaborating on The Everyday Robot Project.