Maybe you can’t imagine Steve Jobs running the huge megatropolis of an internet company, Google, but Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin could. According to a 48 minute documentary on “Game Changers,” produced by Bloomberg TV, Steve Jobs was actually higher on the list of “hopeful” CEO’s before Eric Schmidt.
The documentary chronicles the meeting of Brin and Page and carries it through to today with an emphasis on who would actually run the company they started.
Regardless of your stance in the iPhone vs Android war (and we all know mine) from a “business” only standpoint, Jobs might have been a great choice. Jobs, as we know, started a company that offered a better product than Microsoft in the beginning but never caught on to the mainstream the way Windows did. Apple never lost their footing, OK well when they got close they forced Jobs out. However Jobs was able to come back in and with a single product, the iPod, turn the entire company into a $20 billion profit as of this year.
Although Jobs turned down both Page and Brin, it’s hard to say whether or not he would have been the CEO in the end. We all know that Jobs has a his-way-or-no-way mentality when dealing with everyone from the top down. We also know that he has a bit of a temper and sometimes says some silly things when trying to get his message out.
Schmidt on the other hand, impressed Brin and Page by attending the “Burning Man” hippie art festival. They also relied on the recommendation of John Doerr and Michael Moritz, two very established and well known Venture Capitalists in the Silicon Valley (who were early investors in Compaq, Netscape, Sun, and Amazon just to name a few). Schmidt was no stranger to Silicon Valley having worked at Xerox, Bell Labs, Sun and Novell, the last of which he left the CEO position for Google.
Can’t believe we were almost the Steve Jobs Machine? Check out the Video Documentary Here.
source: Pocketlint, Bloomberg
