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Eric Schmidt, who has been working with Google’s parent company Alphabet as an executive chairman of the board of directors, for a long time has decided to step down. Alphabet has confirmed in a statement to TechCrunch. The longtime Alphabet’s executive on a major role will move into a lower position as “technical advisor”.
Eric joined Google back in 2001. As of now, he will remain on the Alphabet’s board of directors, and the company is looking forward to finding a new non-executive chairman for the board. However, Schmidt’s new role as a technical advisor has not been elaborated much.
The decision of leaving such important role was made after consulting with Google’s founders Larey Page and Sergey Brin, as well as Google CEO Sundar Pichai. As stated by Eric,
“Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition.”
Eric has been doing a good job in his domain and has been often the face of Google and Alphabet in policy-making. Eric also had good terms with Obama’s administration, however, that scenario has changed since Donald Trump took charge. Recently, he also appeared in a forum and talked about his perspective that Google’s is planning to de-rank Russian sites, which are propagating fake news on the social network.
Meanwhile, Alphabet is expected to appoint a new chairman at a meeting next month. However, Eric will be staying on the Alphabet’s board of directors until 2024. Although Alphabet has not clarified much that why a transition is taking place once again, yet the company’s statement seems positive about his working tenure,
“Since 2001, Eric has provided us with business and engineering expertise and a clear vision about the future of technology, during his 17 years of service to the company”.
Eric has also contributed as CEO of Google and he remained the CEO of the tech giant until 2011. However, after a major restructuring in 2015, when a new company Alphabet was created he became the executive chairman of it as well.
