On Wednesday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin took a break from his work on the Internet search leader’s undisclosed projects so that he could make a surprise to make a surprise arrival at a technology conference.
Even if, he had shared few details about their secret project, Brin claims he is always busy since he started over a decade ago as the company’s president of technology. This year, his projects are stealth as part of a shake-up that led to his longtime partner, Larry Page, as Google’s CEO. Brin has kept a low profile ever since the changes.
In the Web 2.0 Summit, in San Francisco, he says he is pretty happy with things has gone.
Brin spends one day a week in meetings with other executives at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. He devotes the rest of his to a series of “infrastructure and research and development” projects. All of his actions kept secret, and the only one that has become public is about the driverless car, which got revealed over a year ago.
After he left the stage, he got approached by a group of reporters; he told them that his current project might be mixed with an existing Google product.
Brin highly praised Page’s performance as CEO, both live and in his meeting with reporters. He is one of the few Google employees who worked at the company in the course of Page’s first go-round as CEO. Page got the toughest in Google’s early days prior to Eric Schmidt takes over the position of CEO back in 2001.
Brin also applauded Google Plus, which the company introduced almost four months ago as an option to Facebook’s well-liked social network. Since then, Google Plus had got into a fast start. The social networking site now has 40 million members. However, it is still far from the 800 million members of Facebook.
That gap could get smaller if Plus lives up to the beliefs of Brin and Page, both 38, and worth almost $17 billion apiece, according to Forbes magazine’s newest rankings. They believe more people is going to be pulled to Plus as they realize the service makes it easier than Facebook in sorting friends into different circles and see the added features Google plans to add throughout the next few months.
As more pieces introduced to the puzzle, Brin believes Plus could become a way in uniting Google’s expanding array of products.
Plus has not been adopted within Google. Just last week, Google engineer Steve Yegge, committed a mistake when made a scathing critique of Plus that can be seen by everyone. He deleted it afterwards, but it was too late as it got copied and pasted on the other members’ status.