Back in the 1980s, Wall Street played a game on Microsoft's duo of Gates and Ballmer, demanding "grown-up supervision" for the then 20-something computer software duo.

Fortunately, Bill and Steve did not take the hint (get lost). They kept their stock, kept control, isolated a succession of adults, and finally came out the other side, billionaires and still in control to this day.

Well, I think Google has now outgrown its grownup.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin not only founded Google, but set many of its most important standards. They understand Google's corporate direction in their bones. But, like Gates and Ballmer back in the day, they were forced by Wall Street to get "adult supervision" in the form of Dr. Eric Schmidt.

Schmidt is, at heart, a computer scientist, and a good one. He is known as the "Father of Java," for his work on that language while at Sun. Then he went to Novell, and nearly rode the thing into the ground. (This should have been a hint, boys.)

What Schmidt has done at Google is to bureaucratize the hell out of it. (Evan Williams was just one victim. Sorry again, Ev.) He buried Blogger, he still hasn't come out with a real blog search solution, and he has taken Google into lots of "me-too" directions, an exception being Google Maps (and I think the folks he bought via Keyhole get the credit for that).

Now his paranoid, corporate mind set has started to do real damage.

This is a time in Google's history when it is vital to remain transparent. It's only advantage over Yahoo and Microsoft is it isn't like them. So when Dr. Schmidt shuts-out News.Com reporters, because they happened to use Google to find out things about him that he'd prefer remained translucent, he is doing major economic damage.

Reputation and credibility are all on the Internet, and Google's has been taking too many hits lately.

It's time for the grown-ups to go, and for the founders to take back control of the ship.