Schmidt Out As Google’s CEO, Page To Take Over

Eric Schmidt is stepping down as CEO of Google Inc., and Larry Page, who helped start the search engine, is taking the top job as of April 4.

Schmidt will stay on as executive chairman of Mountain View, Calif.-based Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).

Page is now the company's president of products. Schmidt will help him get up to speed for the company's top job before he leaves, Google said. Page may have something to learn, as the last time he held the top job at Google was in a very different era, from late 1998 until Schmidt replaced him.

Sergey Brin, Google's other founder, isn't changing his role at the company. He will keep "focusing on strategic products," Google said in a regulatory filing on Thursday.

The company portrayed its change at the top as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. "Larry ... is ready to lead," Schmidt wrote on his blog, adding via Twitter: "Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!"

Schmidt said that although what he called the "triumvirate approach" of leadership by himself, Page and Brin has real benefits, it is time "to clarify our individual roles so there's clear responsibility and accountability."

Schmidt became CEO of Google in July 2001, when he'd already been chairman of the board for several months — Google put him on the board and made him chairman in March of that year.

He was chairman and CEO of Novell Inc. before coming to Google, and he also worked for Sun Microsystems, where he was chief technology officer.

Google has been expanding its presence in Pittsburgh. The company came to town in 2006 when it opened an office on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in the Collaborative Innovation Center. Last year, the company moved into roughly 40,000 square feet of space at the redeveloped Bakery Square, and earlier this month, it confirmed that it intends to take up more than 100,000-square-feet in the building.

On the same day the company announced the management shake-up, it reported year-end profit of $8.5 billion, or $26.31 a share, up from $6.5 billion, or $20.41 per share, a year ago.