Eric Schmidt reportedly out of Google

Google

The Schmidt era seems to have come to an end at Google, and now the former CEO is no longer to serve as a consultant for the IT group.

Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, has reportedly resigned: Details here.

The former head of the US search engine group Google, Eric Schmidt, appears to have left the company completely. According to a report published by the US magazine Cnet, the 65-year-old left his advisory post at Google and its parent company Alphabet as early as February 2020. The medium refers to a person not named. Neither Google nor Schmidt would have wished to comment on the report upon request.

Quiet departure in February 2020.

Schmidt left the Alphabet board a year ago." After 18 years of council meetings, I follow the legacy of Coach Bill Campbell and support the next generation of talents," he wrote on Twitter in April 2019. He also wants to continue working as a consultant for various government projects and as a tutor outside Google.

No leadership role since 2017.

In 2001, Schmidt became the head of the Google Group and shared his leadership with the young founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Schmidt often jokingly described himself as an "adult supervisor" for Page and Brin, said an insider. Ten years later, he resigned from the post of chief and took over Page. Schmidt became Chairman of the Board of Directors and remained on this post when the new umbrella group Alphabet was established in 2015. In December 2017 he resigned as Chairman of the Board of Directors at Alphabet.

Reason for departure remains unclear.

Schmidt is still chairman of an advisory board for the US Department of Defense. The so-called Defense Innovation Advisary Board is designed to harness innovations from the Silicon Valley for the US military. However, there is criticism within Google of closer cooperation with the military. In June 2018, the so-called Maven project, in which images of espionage were to be automatically evaluated and categorised using artificial intelligence (AI), was discontinued after internal protests. Similarly, Google did not participate in the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (Jedi) project. This is about transferring US Department of Defense data to a corporate-operated cloud.