Who’s he?
He is one of the most influential people in the tech and economic world.
His association with Apple, Sun Microsystems and now Google has talked about his credentials at lengths for years now. He joined Google in 2001 and took the company to a global enterprise. Google has dramatically scaled its infrastructure and broadened its offerings while maintaining a culture of strong innovation under his leadership.
Personal Insights and Credentials
Schmidt was born in Washington DC on 27
th April, 1955. He went to study engineering at Princeton University after graduating in 1976. By 1979, he had earned an MS from the University of California and Ph.D in 1982. After completing his Ph.D, he even taught for a while at the Stanford University as a part time professor.
Career and the Milestones
Earlier in his career, Eric was a member of the research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and held positions at Bell Laboratories and Zilog. Already high on his credentials, his career took off when joined Sun Microsystems in 1983 to lead the Java development group as their Chief Technology Officer. In 1997, he was appointed the CEO of Novell. From 1983 to March 1997, Schmidt held various positions at Sun Microsystems Inc., including Chief Technology Officer, Corporate Executive Officer; President, Sun Technology Enterprises; Vice President, General Systems Group; and Vice President and General Manager, Software Products division.
Google came in March 2001, when impressed by his intelligence; the founders recruited him as the chairman of the board of Directors. By August of the same year, he was made the CEO. He helped grow the company from a Silicon Valley startup to a global enterprise.
Schmidt was elected to Apple's board of directors on August 28, 2006. On August 3, 2009 it was announced that Schmidt would resign his board member position at Apple due to conflict of interests and the growing competition between Google and Apple. In 2007, Schmidt was cited by PC World as #1 on the list of the 50 Most Important People on the Web, along with Google co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Besides Google
- Member of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
- Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a fellow in 2007.
- Chairman of the board of the New America Foundation.
Schimdt has always believed in ideating. He believes that we cannot think with a sword hanging on our head and so google devotes time to unravel and think out of the box. Schmidt introduced new products from the popular Web-based e-mail service Gmail (Google Mail in Germany and the UK) to the recently unveiled G1 mobile phone. Even as a head of a tech brand, he has a soft corner for the old media channels like newspaper which he feels can never be replaced with web and blogs.
