Fortune: Business Person of the Year, Google's Larry Page

"The Most Ambitious CEO In The Universe"

[engine]

Some will disagree with me, i'm sure, but he probably deserves the award for his forward thinking and vision.

There are plenty of others that deserve the award, too, i'm sure, but they don't have the financial war chest to be able to explore and to invest their vision.

As Google’s core business continues to thrive, Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology—ingestible nanoparticles, balloons that beam down broadband—that could define the future.Fortune: Business Person of the Year, Google's Larry Page [fortune.com]

Google’s original mission—“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—once seemed preposterously audacious. Today that vision “is probably a bit too narrow,” Page says. He wants the company he co-founded as a Stanford grad student to continue altering the world in ways unimaginable to most. It’s the combination of that intensity of purpose with Google’s eye-poppingly strong financial results that makes Page Fortune’s 2014 Businessperson of the Year.

[treeline]

Good for him. Lots of businesses succeed and just keep doing the same thing until it stops working. He's investing enough to have another mega-product by the time search & ads fade.

[samwest]

I guess you're a business genius if you can sell thin air and make 150M per day doing it. They have very little in the way of competition.

[seoskunk]

Why am I reminded of that Richard Pryer film "Brewsters Millions" where every crazy idea he invested in turned up trumps........?

[youtube.com...]

[EditorialGuy]

They have very little in the way of competition.

Apple is a pretty big competitor in phone operating systems, and both Apple and Microsoft have a big lead over Chrome in desktop and laptop OSes. Google is in other businesses, too, such as cloud services, where it has plenty of competitors.

Still if you want to limit the discussion to Google Search, it's worth noting that Google had a number of serious competitors that it had to beat when it started out. Just off the top of my head, I can think of AltaVista, Infoseek, Excite, and HotBot. And in today's world, let's not forget Bing (the latest generation of Microsoft's search product, in which Microsoft has invested several billion dollars), Baidu, and Yandex.