But that was fair. Page wanted to do a browser super early, like years before the IPO, and Schmidt was brought in specifically to try and bring some focus to the company and balance out the founder's ambition with more "adult" execution. Yes eventually Chrome became a successful project and Schmidt wisely didn't pick a fight over it, but he wasn't wrong to insist the company try to avoid getting distracted with that so early in its life.
Again, I am an outsider and uniformed. But the established money printer was already going brrrrr...
I would imagine that it's arguable that a pheasant could have ridden that rocket to the moon.
My bias and stupidity may be showing here, but I just don't think that he is very smart. Maybe that was the point of his position: to keep the company from going beyond the imagination of Wall Street normies.
I was an insider at that time and I didn't disagree with that decision, especially as Google were funnelling money to Firefox and at that time Firefox was executing well and had a lot of support across the community. Part of why the money printer was going brrr was a relentless effort on optimizing it and growing it, which did benefit from the executives actually focussing on it. The idea it all just happened automatically just isn't so.
