Technically yes, but that version of Adwords was pretty small. The actual Adwords that made the company so successful was called "Adwords Select" at launch, the one with the Vickrey auction. It launched in 2002 after Schmidt was at the company and with a lot of support by him. Particularly when the AOL deal was negotiated. He was certainly part of making it an advertising-centric company but that was by no means his sole doing.

There's plenty of reasons to criticize Schmidt. His role in the collusion to suppress salaries along with Adobe, Apple Inc., Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay was a particular lowlight of his career at Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

I disagree -- the original AdWords felt like it was intended to be different. It was visually subtle, ads were clearly marked as ads, and the way it worked was completely transparent.

Google made a choice to enshittify AdWords.

Schmidt was the CEO of Novell which was a well known company at the time.

And Google was a pretty unsafe bet.

It's easy to say in hindsight that these people were lucky but at the time most of the founders you list made bets that were pretty unorthodox.

FTFY:

He's rumoured to be lover of Michelle Ritter of Steel Perlot. Steel Perlot is apparently his main investment.

Scnmidt may have been lucky enough to "be in the right place at the right time". Time will tell.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2023/10/23/eric-schm...

Shorter, factual, and easily as informative but without slurs.

I'm identifying this as whinging without an actual complaint. Some people are lucky, and putting his girlfriend in charge of something is unimpressive but also unobjectionable in the main.

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