Larry Page goes nuts
Oh man, ROCK ON. Maybe it's the billions he's losing in GOOG's price drops, but Larry Page is reportedly wreaking havoc.
Here's some fuel for your fire: a couple weeks ago, at a regular engineering all-hands, Larry Page went on a half-hour rant that left the entire engineering team wondering if he's gone nuts.
He spent a long time lecturing everyone about how we're not smart enough to pick the right projects to work on, and he singled out a couple of projects (in front of hundreds of engineers) to complain about because they weren't using shared infrastructure components.
Then he announced that he doesn't want people to use 20% time to work on new ideas — yep, Larry has suddenly decided that the only good way to use 20% time is to work on someone else's project.
So don't expect to see any products like Google News coming out any time soon.
Wait, isn't Sergey supposed to be the disruptive one? Anyway, this tipster hasn't been confirmed as reliable yet, so if anyone can verify, e-mail tips@valleywag.com. Good tipsters get comment accounts.
Update: A source says that CEO Eric Schmidt may have started the drama during discussions over Google Video, and that this may all be old news to the Googlefolk.