In the Search Market, Google remains dominant, but in social networking Google must come from behind. Will Google soar or struggle under Page? That depends on how effective a wartime CEO he turns out to be. It may depend even more on whether the most characteristically peacetime company in the industry can make the cultural transition into war.
I think the metaphor of peacetime CEO/wartime CEO works when we look at Google right now. Salaries tied to success in social. Nixing of public-facing Labs site. The eventual shut down of many non-performing Google products (this HAS to happen).
Yet, do we have to see Google only in wartime mode? In this modern age doesn't every innovative company have to balance war and peace (apologies to Tolstoy) simultaneously? "Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer." "Collaboration is the new competition." I think in some ways war is peace and peace is war, and it's the CEO who knows what takes a peace approach, and what a war approach, who's really got the stuff (for example, Google would be foolish to do away with 20% time, a "peacetime" policy, since it would make its "wartime" armor weak in years to come).
We're moving into an age of dichotomies in which the old peace/war distinction simply doesn't work.
