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"Google announced its fourth quarter earnings this afternoon, and with it the news that co-founder Larry Page is replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO of the company, effective April 4.\nPage, who served as Google's first CEO from 1998 to 2001, will take over Google's day-to-day operations, while Schmidt will assume the role of executive chairman of Google, \"focusing externally on deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership,\" Google said in a statement. He will  continue to act as an internal advisor to Page and Google's other co-founder, Sergey Brin, who oversees Google's strategic projects, Schmidt explained in a blog post.\n\u201CWe\u2019ve been talking about how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making for a long time,\" Schmidt said in the statement. \"By clarifying our individual roles we\u2019ll create clearer responsibility and accountability at the top of the company. In my clear opinion, Larry is ready to lead and I\u2019m excited about working with both him and Sergey for a long time to come.\u201D\nPage added, \u201CEric has clearly done an outstanding job leading Google for the last decade. The results speak for themselves. There is no other CEO in the world that could have kept such headstrong founders so deeply involved and still run the business so brilliantly. Eric is a tremendous leader and I have learned innumerable lessons from him. His advice and efforts will be invaluable to me as I start in this new role. Google still has such incredible opportunity \u2014 we are only at the beginning and I can't wait to get started.\u201D\nOn a lighter note, Schmidt tweeted, \"Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!\"\nFor further analysis on the change, please see my colleague Ben Parr's post.\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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