Eric Schmidt: On April 4th I Will Step Down, Larry Page to be CEO

From my (very limited) perspective, this seems to be mostly publicly clarifying the roles they were already effectively serving in their ad hoc division of labor for a while.

Larry has been the most involved in the technology details, Sergey has been the most involved in the blue-sky new projects, and Eric has been the most involved in the interaction between Google and other entities (as well as very high level direction.)

My initial reaction was that this was just another Google April fools joke.

Tried and true: founders make terrific CEOs.

EDIT, Context being tech: Hastings, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates. I'd say Google was a company in the spirit of these before WorldCom, Enron and Countrywide Financial.

Sometimes people switch out from being CEO to being chairman because it's just more fun being the globe-trotting-jet-setting-lunching-with-Obama guy schmoozing and closing deals and partnerships than being the tedious micromanager.

Just saying.

But it's also fun to fantasize, speculate, and gossip about really rich and important people.

Leading a decade of mediocre home-grown products (save for Gmail)?

EDIT: Name one hit Google product Schmidt oversaw (again, save for Gmail) that wasn't an acquisition. This is supposed to be a company of innovation.

EDIT 2: I regret the use of mediocre. I'm sure the technology, like everything that comes out of Google, was top notch. Certain products though, like Buzz, Wave, and TV, and the bizarrely bifurcated-from-Android Chrome OS, lacked a degree of oversight and discipline before launch that ended up hurting their brand in the space of consumer products. I also think something to consider is that this culture of acquisition has to be very bad for their employee turnover rate.