Larry Page's Google Version 3.

0 The company co-founder and his star deputies are trying to root out bureaucracy and rediscover the nimble moves of youth,says Brad Stone Every Monday afternoon at the Googleplex in Mountain View,Calif., more than a dozen of Googles top executives gather in the companys boardroom.The weekly meeting,known as Execute,was launched last summer with a specific mission: to get the nearsovereign leaders of Googles far-flung product groups into a single room and harmonize their disparate initiatives.Google co-founder Sergey Brin runs the meeting,along with new Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and soon-to-be-former CEO Eric Schmidt. Among the most important barons at the meeting: Andy Rubin,who oversees the Android operating system for mobile phones;Salar Kamangar,who runs the video-sharing site YouTube;and Vic Gundotra,who heads up Googles secret project to combat the social network Facebook.We needed to get these different product leaders together to find time to talk through all the integration points, says Page during a telephone interview with Bloomberg Businessweek minutes before a late-January Execute session.Every time we increase the size of the company,we need to keep things going to make sure we keep our speed,pace,and passion. The new weekly rituallike the surprise announcement on Jan.20 that Page will take over from Schmidt in Aprilmarks a significant shift in strategy at the worlds most famous Internet company.Welcome to Google 3.0.In the 1.0 era,which ran from 1996 to 2001,Page and Brin incubated the company at Stanford University.In 2001 they ushered in the triumphant 2.0 era by hiring Schmidt,a tech industry grown-up whod been chief

executive officerof Novell. Although Google recently reported that fourthquarter profits jumped 29 percent over the previous year,its stock rose only 13.7 percent over the past 12 months,disappointing investors and lagging the Standard & Poors 500-stock index.Google is being outpaced by rivals such as Facebook in social networking.In 2010,Facebook served up more display ads than either Google or Yahoo! - and was visited by more US Internet users.And Apple is setting the pace in mobile computing,with beloved products that use a proprietary operating system that can be closed off to Googles services if the company so chooses. Former Google employees are encouraged.Larry is a visionary,the kind of person that inspires people to do more,be better,reach farther, says Douglas Merrill,Googles chief information officer until 2008.He would walk around the engineering department and,with just a word or two,guide or redirect projects and leave the developers feeling great about the coaching. Google periodically invites celebrities to give talks at the Googleplex.Last May,Conan OBrien came by.Interviewing the comedian in front of several hundred employees was not Schmidt,Page,or Brin but Vic Gundotra,the engineering vicepresident and one of Googles fastest-rising stars.Gundotra,41,is known as a smooth operator.Not this time.For nearly an hour,OBrien derided him and his attempts at humor.[ This is] the most condescending man Ive ever met, OBrien said. Gundotra stands out at Google for more than his ability to absorb ridicule.Hes Googles field general on two fronts: against Apple for the hearts and minds of mobile developers and in a new conflict with Facebook to control the next set of social connections on the Web.Schmidt and the co-founders soon put Gundotra in charge of Googles effort to create applications for mobile devices.Under his watch,Google cranked out a much faster mobile search engine,a more useful Google Maps,and Google

Goggles,which lets phone owners get information on things around them by pointing the camera at them.He also became point man for dealings with software developers,racing Microsoft and Apple to persuade programmers to write for Googles cloud services and its Android platform for phones. Gundotra has also sparred with Apple behind the scenes.As Android became a threat to Apple in 2008,Apple began resisting Googles claim to valuable location data gathered whenever an iPhone owner used Google Maps.His negotiations with Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller grew so heated that Schmidt and Steve Jobs had to intervene to settle the matter,according to two people familiar with the incident.In October,Gundotra assumed joint command of a secret SWAT team to add social elements to Googles array of services.The company hopes the effort will help it combat Facebook and rebound from botched social networking forays such as Buzz and OpenSocial,a failed 2007 attempt to forge an alliance of social networks other than Facebook. Gundotra wont say much about the initiative,but Page hints that Googles social network plans will offer more refined privacy protections.You see tremendous controversy around [social networks ] today,with people being worried: Am I sharing stuff with the right people or not Page says.I think theres a long,long way to go to make these systems do what people need. Andy Rubin is a tinkerer,as adept at creating mechanical marvels in his home as he is writing the software that runs tablets and mobile phones.His latest invention,produced with several Google colleagues,is Java the Bot, a wheeled twoarmed robot that can roll up to an espresso machine and perform all the steps needed to make a decent cup of coffee.(Its still in development.) From a computer science perspective,its an unsolved problem, he says,emphasizing that he has no plans to put Starbucks baristas out of business.

Since Google acquired his eight-person startup,Android,in 2005,Rubin has expended most of his entrepreneurial energy within the Googleplex.His Android platform has pulled off arguably the fastest land grab in tech history,jumping from alsoran to market leader with 26 percent of the smartphone market,vs.25 percent for iPhone,according to research firm ComScore.Inside Google,Rubin has been expanding his domain.Android software powers the companys fledgling (and thus far poorly reviewed) Google TV.A new version of Android called Honeycomb will run tablet devices made by Motorola and others that are designed to compete with the iPad. Last October,Googles effort to streamline and accelerate decision-making reached its most important divisionsearch.Marissa Mayer,one of the groups longtime leaders,left search to lead Googles effort to go after the growing market for local services.The search engine,which had been run by two groups,products and engineering,was unified under the control of former Amazon.com executive Udi Manber. Manber shuns the spotlight,so representing search often falls to his deputy,Amit Singhal.Singhal,42,an excitable and expressive search scientist from Jhansi,India,became Google employee No.190 in 2000 and has for the past decade run the ranking and relevancy algorithmsthe engine room that for 12 years has made Google search outrun its rivals.Singhal insists that even a division as large as search,with thousands of engineers,is responding to Pages call to accelerate the pace of innovation.Search quality has gone up at a speed which I have never witnessed in my career, Sing hal says of the last few years. The search engine,like much else at Google,has been under attack recently.Marketers and some technology industry bloggers say it is returning more links to spammy sites such as cheaply produced content mills and user-generated question-and-answer pages.While Singhal disputes this sentiment,Google has recently

moved to address the complaints.A blog post on Jan.21 from Matt Cutts,who shares an office with Singhal,pledged to penalize companies that churn out pages with low-quality content and then try to fool Googles technology in order to appear prominently in search results. How social media will and wont change Googles world is an ongoing conversation at Googles weekly Execute meetingsand it underscores Larry Pages biggest problem as Googles new CEO.Page values strong,idiosyncratic leaders who know their domains and have their own aggressive agendas.All these rising stars have to work together.The mobile team has to coordinate with the nascent local and e-commerce groups.Rubins app-based Android vision of the future has to square with Pichais push for the wide-open Web of Chrome OS;and Singhals search division has to find common ground with Vic Gundotra and the new czars of social.Can they integrate their plans while satisfying Larry Pages need for speed At some point,Page may have to dispense with the philosophical discussions,put some limits on the open atmosphere of geeky experimentation,and make some tough decisions.Its not very Googley. But its the central challenge of Google 3.0. Bloomberg BusinessWeek