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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has finally gotten the message and joined Google+.
The former Google CEO wrote his first public message on Google+ earlier today, a simple post with links to his thoughts on Steve Jobs (Schmidt served on Apple’s board of directors until 2009, when the competition between Android and iPhone became a major conflict of interest).
I recently criticized Google’s management for not eating its own dog food and using Google+. At the time, Schmidt didn’t even have a Google+ account. Only two Google executives — SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai and SVP of Social Vic Gundotra — were active users of Google+ (at least in public — it’s important to note that additional Google executives may have been more active privately).
Since that article, several Google executives have started posting publicly to Google+. They include SVP of Search Alan Eustace and SVP of Ads Susan Wojcicki, and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora.
To Arora’s credit, he directly addressed the points I made in my article. “Having worked closely with my friend Vic on this, I think I have lots of dog food in me,” he told a Google+ user. “I do prefer posting to circles and sharing with people who have expressed interest in following me. I intend to follow a lot of your advice. Perhaps if I have pearls of wisdom to share, I might do so publicly.”
Google+ has received additional scrutiny in recent weeks. Google+ traffic has fallen since the spike from its public launch and a Google engineer’s rant about how Google+ “is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo).”
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