San Francisco: Technology giants Google and Hewlett-Packard announced surprise makeovers of their leadership on Thursday.
HP is trying to put a fresh face on its scandal-scarred board, swapping out four directors. Google disclosed that chief executive Eric Schmidt is relinquishing the job to co-founder Larry Page. The shake-up at HP comes as new leadership tries to dampen shareholder anger over the handling of CEO Mark Hurd's ouster six months ago.
Hurd's abrupt exit caused billions of dollars in shareholder wealth to evaporate, and his generous severance triggered lawsuits accusing HP's board of squandering the company's money. Hurd's immediate move to rival Oracle Corp, which earned him a rich new employment contract, added to investors' ire.
Annual meeting
The decision by four of HP's current board members to not stand for re-election at HP's annual meeting in March represents an unusually large exodus for a company of HP's size.
Schmidt, a technology veteran brought in as Google's "adult supervision" a decade ago, is relinquishing the CEO job to Larry Page, one of the prodigies who co-founded the company behind the internet's dominant gateway.
The surprise shake-up appears to be driven by Schmidt's desire to tackle other challenges as much as Page's personal ambition.
"Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!" Schmidt wrote on his Twitter account moments after Google dropped the bombshell that upstaged its fourth-quarter earnings. Schmidt, 55, will become executive chairman and remain available to advise Page, 37, and Google's other 37-year-old founder, Sergey Brin. Under the new pecking order effective April 4, Page will reclaim the CEO job that he held for three years before the two venture capitalist firms backing Google in its early days insisted that a more mature leader be brought aboard.
Google now boasts a market value of more than $200 billion (Dh735.6 billion), a success story that has placed Page, Brin and Schmidt among the world's wealthiest people. The three men are Google's largest individual shareholders, stakes that turned them all into multibillionaires.
HP's housecleaning comes less than three months after Leo Apotheker, a former CEO of German business software maker SAP, took over as HP's CEO, and Ray Lane, a former Oracle executive who famously clashed with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, assumed the chairmanship at HP. It also comes as HP is opening a new investigation into the circumstances of Hurd's departure and severance.
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