The Trumping of Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt will step down as the Chairman of Alphabet, Google parent company; blame politics for that. As a visible backer to Hillary Clinton, he lost when Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency. With Trump in power, Eric has no power in Washington and Alphabet has minimal use of him.
As Google battles regulators from Europe to America with constellations of issues with competitors, Eric increasingly looks irrelevant: he has no one to call to stop the tide. Politics is a very dangerous thing in business especially in the age of Trump where if you are in, you are in. If not, you do not exist.
Mr. Schmidt will relinquish the executive chairman role at Alphabet’s next board meeting. He will continue to serve on the company’s board and will become a technical adviser to Alphabet. No reason was provided for the change. In a statement, Mr. Schmidt said that he, Mr. Page, Mr. Brin and Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, “believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition.”
Do not miss the mark: Google is losing its cool and as they noted, the company wants to have a new "evolution" for the company. They have concluded that a weakened ambassador with no influence in Washington cannot execute that. It is not just Google, a co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund, Robert Mercer is resigning because he was too close to Trump people. And customers were not having it.
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My simple principle is this: support all politicians but work for none. Dangote has a playbook for that.