A To Do List For Google's New CEO Larry Page
Welcome back, Larry! When you were last CEO of Google in 2001, the company was a much loved scrappy underdog with a bright future. Ten years later, you're coming back to the helm. Things have changed. You're soon to be steering …
Context & Ripple Effects
Larry Page's return as Google CEO closes a loop the corpus has been circling for years: back in December 2005, Google Blogoscoped ran an imaginary interview with Page set in 2038, treating him as the company's long-horizon figure even while Eric Schmidt held the job. Now that hypothetical succession has arrived — confirmed across the coverage on January 21-22, 2011 — and Search Engine Land's checklist frames it as a homecoming to a company that was 'a much loved scrappy underdog' when Page last ran it in 2001.
The timing matters because the agenda items were already piling up before he took the seat. In the same news cycle, spam chief Matt Cutts said Google had discussed letting searchers blacklist domains outright (still unconfirmed as policy), Android Market rules banning apps acting as mini-app stores had just gone into force, and Honeycomb tablets shipped without minimum hardware specs amid rumors the OS might skip smartphones entirely. A Quora thread asking what Page should focus on drew syndicated attention the same day — the public was drafting his agenda alongside the trade press.
First-order effects
- Page inherits a live spam problem as his most visible early test: the domain-blacklisting idea Cutts floated is unconfirmed, so searchers and publishers alike will read whatever he does next as signaling whether user-facing controls beat algorithmic fixes.
- Android's governance tightens on his watch by default — the mini-app-store ban is already enforced, so developers distributing through alternative storefronts inside apps now answer to a founder-led CEO rather than a management layer.
Second-order effects
- Honeycomb's positioning forces an early strategic call: with no minimum hardware specs on announced tablets and rumors it may never reach smartphones, handset partners and app developers need clarity on whether Google is running one Android or two.
- Rival platforms gain an opening if Google's transition period looks inward — any perception that search quality or developer-rule enforcement is drifting during the handover shifts publisher and developer attention toward alternatives.
Third-order effects
- A founder retaking the CEO chair a decade into a professional-manager structure points toward the broader pattern of maturing web companies re-centralizing product authority in their founding engineers, with the executive layer recast as support rather than direction.
- If Page treats spam and platform rule enforcement as signature issues, Google's identity shifts from scrappy underdog toward rule-setting gatekeeper — the very position whose trade-offs (user trust vs. publisher dependence) will define its regulatory exposure.
The trend: Maturing web giants are rotating founders back into the CEO seat, trading managerial scale for product-level control at precisely the moment platform-governance questions like spam and marketplace rules become board-level issues.