Larry Page's Google 3.0

Welcome to Google 3.0.

In the 1.0 era, which ran from 1996 to 2001, Larry Page and Sergey Brin incubated the company at Stanford University and in a Menlo Park (CA) garage. In 2001 they ushered in the triumphant 2.0 era by hiring Eric Schmidt, a tech industry grown-up who'd been CEO of Novell.

Now comes the third phase, led by Page and dedicated to rooting out bureaucracy and rediscovering the nimble moves of youth. The creative chaos inside Google's halls—a decentralized jungle of innovation, as one prominent venture capitalist puts it—once empowered employees to make bold moves, such as creating Gmail, the search-based e-mail system. Other than Android, the culture has recently produced a string of flops, such as Google Buzz, a Twitter clone, and Google Wave, a wonky service that let people collaborate online. Page doesn't explicitly blame those missteps on the company's loosely knit management or the famous troika at the top. Yet he concedes, "We do pay a price for [shared decision-making], in terms of speed and people not necessarily knowing where they go to ask questions." His elevation to CEO, he says, "is really a clarification of our roles. I think it will help with our speed."