If you someone from the year traveled back in time and told you about the eventual fate of Yahoo, it would have been hard to believe. Flash forward a decade and a half or so and Yahoo has been sold off to Verizon and folded into Oath, a media conglomerate ultimately rebranded as Verizon Media. Rumor has it people still use its email service. Just a few years after hiring Schmidt, Google was on a fast-moving rocket to the upper echelon of not just the tech industry, but the broader American business landscape.
That Class B stock came with 10 times the voting power of a Class A share, meaning Page and Brin would hoard just over 50 percent of it as a way to maintain control of the company in perpetuity, and that remains the case even today following their official departure. He did so without telling Schmidt , who was then still CEO, because Page believed so strongly that Android co-founder Andy Rubin could help the company make inroads in the mobile software market.
Of course, Android would go on to become the most popular mobile OS in the world. The project underwent a last-minute course correction after Rubin watched Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone in , famously viewing the presentation on a laptop while riding a cab in Las Vegas. Susan Wojcicki was the 16th employee at Google and the person whose garage the company was literally started out of.
So she moved fast to buy it while Google still had an upper hand at the negotiation table. After Page and Brin hired a number of developers from Mozilla Firefox, and at the suggestion of superstar product manager Sundar Pichai, Google embarked on its quest to build a better web browser.
It was the beginning of a new era for the company as Page and Brin would employ their newfound control of the company to launch its Google X skunkworks, and delve further into experimental hardware and long-term projects far outside the bounds of its core product offerings. Google had hired a team of skydivers to jump out of an airplane above San Francisco while live streaming the jump from a Glass prototype. It was far and away the most impressive tech demo since the unveiling of the iPhone, and it was very much Page and Brin telling the world that Google was about much more than boring web products.
They were signaling to everyone in attendance and watching online that Google would deliver the future faster than any of its competitors. The condition has affected Page at various points in his life, but it hit him particularly hard the year after he took the reins back at Google. There, wearing a bright red shirt under a jet black jacket, Page detailed his vision for a so-called Google Island , where technological progress could march on unabated by silly concerns like regulatory requirements and ethics.
He wanted a slice of the world that could just develop new tech for the sake of it and to better humanity. He stepped down as chief executive of Google's parent company Alphabet in , but remains a board member and controlling shareholder. He is not the first Silicon Valley tech billionaire to have taken a particular interest in New Zealand.
Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Paypal and early investor in Facebook, once described the South Pacific island nation as "the future" and became a citizen back in He has since invested heavily there. Located more than 6, miles 10,km from the US mainland, New Zealand was recently identified as a country more resilient than most to the threat of climate change. In a study released last month, researchers at the UK-based Global Sustainability Institute described New Zealand as "best placed to survive the collapse of global civilisation".
The temperate, mountainous country is well-placed to deal with threats such as rising sea levels. Page and Brin later took charge of Google's new parent company, Alphabet, until stepping down from their everyday roles in late His father, Carl Page, was a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence, and his mother taught computer programming.
After earning a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of Michigan, Page decided to concentrate on computer engineering for graduate school at Stanford University, where he met Brin. As a research project at Stanford University, Page and Brin created a search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the pages, after concluding that the most popular result would often be the most useful. They called the search engine "Google" after the mathematical term "googol," which refers to the No.
Google has since become the world's most popular search engine, receiving an average of 5. Headquartered in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, Google held its initial public offering in August , making Page and Brin billionaires. In September , Page was ranked No.
That October, he was ranked No. As Google's CEO, Page shared responsibility for the company's operations with Brin, who served as director of special projects for Google, and Eric Schmidt, the company's executive chairman.
Alphabet Deserves Better. Alphabet is also contending with a particularly vocal workforce, thousands of whom have walked out to protest the way the company has handled allegations of sexual misconduct by highly paid executives , and who have continued to protest within the company in the year since.
Those employees may still miss Page, even as they wish he was more present. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
0コメント