Chief Seeks More Agile Google

Larry Page's PageRank algorithm was the basis for Google Inc.'s search engine. As Google's new chief executive, Mr. Page will face the challenge of leading a company that has grown far beyond that algorithm and must compete with agile Web upstarts such as Facebook Inc. and Groupon Inc.
On Friday, a day after being named to replace outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt in April, Mr. Page gave little hint of how he planned to tackle such challenges. The 38-year-old Google co-founder didn't immediately address employees in an all-hands note or meeting, said a person familiar with the matter, though the company has a weekly Friday meeting that Mr. Page was expected to attend.
But several of Mr. Page's former colleagues describe him as having similarities to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, whom Mr. Page has said he admired. Both men are strong willed, sometimes impolite and push engineers hard to execute their ambitious projects.
Some former colleagues said Mr. Page is likely to try to pierce through the sometimes "paralyzing" bureaucracy that product managers and engineers have faced when trying to launch some Google products in recent years.
On Thursday, Messrs. Page and Schmidt said some top-level decision-making had gotten slower and the management change would improve that. Also, the company has said it is trying to allow more projects to operate like start-ups inside of Google in order to speed up innovation.
"Larry's style is going to be different [than Mr. Schmidt's], but he has amazing instincts around developing products and is a tireless champion for improving users' experience," said David Scacco, who joined Google as its first advertising sales executive in 2000 and is now chief revenue officer at MyLikes, a social-media ad company.
The record of technology company founders who later take on the CEO role is mixed. Mr. Jobs revived then-foundering Apple when he became its CEO in 1997 and has since propelled it to become the world's most valuable technology concern.
Others who have tried to pull off the same feat have stumbled. Yahoo Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang led the company between 2007 and 2009, but handed the reins over to current CEO Carol Bartz. Michael Dell, who returned to turn around Dell Inc. in 2007, is still in the process of revitalizing the personal computer company.
Mr. Page is taking over as Google is working to further diversify its revenue streams beyond Internet search advertising and is facing increased competition from companies like Facebook.
Google so far has failed to gain major traction with social-networking-type services such as Google Buzz, but is continuing to develop new initiatives in that area, people familiar with the matter have said.

When asked about competition from social-networking sites like Facebook during Google's fourth-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday, Mr. Page said, "We are only at the very, very early stages of that, and I'm incredibly excited about the possibilities."
He didn't discuss his strategy for running the company on Thursday's conference call, and a Google spokeswoman declined to make Mr. Page available Friday.
Mr. Page, who was born and raised in Michigan and later attended Stanford University, where he met Google co-founder Sergey Brin, was Google's CEO early on after the start-up was founded in 1998.
He has helped make key decisions at the company since giving up the CEO reins to Mr. Schmidt in 2001.
Mr. Page helped oversee the creation of Google's popular email service Gmail and the Chrome Web browser. He also championed acquisitions such as that of YouTube, the video site, in 2006.
Mr. Page has also played roles in projects that didn't take off, including the Orkut social-networking service.
Mr. Page's passions extend beyond the Internet. His emphasis on clean energy helped lead to Google installing solar panels on the roof of its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, and he helped put together a team at Google that is developing technology to help cars drive themselves.
Former Google employees and executives who worked with Mr. Page or attended executive management meetings said he sometimes appeared uninterested in the sessions and allowed Mr. Schmidt to take charge. He also showed little care for matters like budgets and policy, functions that Mr. Schmidt gravitated toward, they said.
Mr. Page's desire to move quickly on ambitious ideas was stifled by company bureaucracy, according to people who worked with him. He often told mid-level engineers to instantly roll out changes to the search engine, but the process would often take several weeks as those engineers worked with their immediate supervisors, said a person familiar with the matter.
Another pet project in recent years was a service called "G Drive" that would allow consumers to store music files and other data online. But "it wasn't prioritized as he would have liked," said a person familiar with the matter.
The product was never launched.