Eric Schmidt, who once served as Google CEO and mentor to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is officially out of the company. The last position held by Schmidt was as technical advisor to Alphabet, the parent company of the search giant, and as of February 2020, he has relinquished the post.
The departure was not reported widely but was confirmed by a source with access to inside developments in Alphabet and Google. The same source added Schmidt has been out since February.
According to CNET, Schmidt getting out of the company he served since 2001 did not come as a complete surprise. He has been dabbling in government projects and private initiatives for years that talk about conflict of interest have emerged inevitably.
Now that his official ties with the Silicon Valley titan have been cut, it is expected that Schmidt will refocus on fresh interests he developed while doing mostly background works for Page and Brin.
Schmidt winding down on his responsibilities with Google started in 2011 when he stepped down as company chief executive and paved the way for Page to reassume the CEO role. He stayed on as executive vice-chairman and served in the same capacity at Alphabet until 2017.
In the same year, it was announced that Schmidt will no longer handle operational roles in both Google and Alphabet. It marked a period of transition in the company that also saw Page giving up his post to Sundar Pichai.
Most recently, the New York government has announced that Schmidt will head the commission that will be tasked with the upgrade of the technological infrastructure of the state, which likely is among the chief reasons that necessitate his exit from Google.
As CNET noted, the departure is all but a formality as the executive was listed as a $1 per year advisor for Google. It was interesting too that Schmidt's role in Alphabet has been largely undefined, but he has his own office and staff.
The legacy that Schmidt left at Google is certainly huge, according to Engadget. He had supervised a crew of startup that in no time was transformed as a leading company that first made its mark to the search engine business and diversified in other sectors of the tech industry.
Under his watch, Google exploded and saw other divisions growing unprecedentedly. YouTube became the leading video sharing platform in the world, and Android established itself as the dominant smartphone operating system that allowed Google to push its ecosystem to hundreds of millions of users around the world.
Leaving Google indicated the end of an era for the company as the report reminded: "Schmidt ran Google during its rapid growth from a search startup to a tech colossus that branched out into smartphones, email, and numerous other fields."
Schmidt was brought in to Google for his leadership and credibility, and it was hard to deny that the company thrived partly because he was there.
