A friend tells me that Eric Schmidt isn't really in charge of Google, that it's still Sergey and Larry's show.

I don't know. That might be. If it is they have tipped their hand as to their corporate culture.

They're collectors. They collect great minds. Whether they listen to these minds is unclear. But they love to collect them. Get the whole set, like other kids collect trading stamps.

The latest "great mind" to join the collection is Elliot Schrage (above). He follows Vinton Cerf, "the father of the Internet" (so called) and Dr. Schmidt himself, the "father of Java" (also so-called).
The collectors like those kinds of titles. They like credentials. They're Stanford guys. They want proof of quality. Credentials are proof of quality.

Schrage is considered a "guru" on "sustainable sourcing." He's a lawyer, not just a PR guy, although the title he takes includes PR. He's a Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.

He's a Big Head.

Google is gathering a lot of Big Heads, but it's unclear to me whether this is going to work any better than Microsoft's efforts at recruiting "high bandwidth" graduates. It's not the players that make the team. It's coaching and teamwork and working together that gets the results.

What would constitute results in this case? Right now Google is marching in several different directions, driven by what appears to be the never-ending money supply of Bubble 2.0. It's working to be a phone company, it's talking about getting into TV, and it's taking search in many different directions.

The problem is that it's becoming Oakland. There's becoming less-and-less "there" there. No direction.No vision. No game plan. Just a bunch of high profile people thinking big thoughts, and a lot of other people spending money on projects with big ideas behind them.

There have been successes and failures under this regime. Google Earth is a success. Blogger is (so far) a failure. Where it goes from here no one knows. But Google has a limited time horizon in its present mode. Its stock is currently a Bubble Stock, and once the bubble pops money will become much more expensive.

It needs a strategic vision that fits on a napkin, a few words, a sentence, that describes where it's heading, a unique direction no one else can go in.

Until recently the word was Search. I suspect the new word should be Find.

But I'm not a Big Head. I don't have Big Credentials. Thus Larry Page and Sergey Brin have no reason to listen to me.

Which is the problem with Big Credentials. Because they didn't have any either, when they got their idea for a new search company.