HUGE Google Android Shakeup!

Apparently even Google and its modernistic management team is not immune to the tried and true CEO message when something big happens and it centers on a big name. In this case, longtime Android leader Andy Rubin - who is now out as Android's leader. Technical, business, religious/spiritual leader – all of the above have been Rubin's simultaneous Android roles since 2005, but let's get on that CEO message from Larry Page about it:

"Andy's decided it's time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google. Andy, more moonshots, please!" CEO Larry Page wrote in a blog post this morning.

Ok, so perhaps that isn't exactly a traditional statement, but for Google it represents that. And it means, unequivocally, that Andy Rubin is out as the leader of Google's Android efforts.

Perhaps what is more interesting here is that Rubin will be handing the reins (or Page is handing the reins) over to…wait for it…Sundar Pichai, a nine-year Google veteran who is the senior vice president for Chrome and Apps. Pichai is Chrome's technical, business and religious/spiritual leader. Now he will need to bring the Android flock into his spiritual, business and technical realm.

It's certainly interesting to note the parallel universe in Rome, where the new pope has just been voted in - though as we write we don't yet know who it is.

Can we come to any other conclusion other than Google has finally taken the necessary step to bring Chrome and Android together? For such a thing to take place it requires Rubin to be moved out. Under Rubin we can see no way that such integration could ever take place. With Pichai, however, the exact opposite is true - from a leadership perspective it is far easier to bring Android into the Chrome fold than to bring Chrome into the Android fold.

Hence, Page's "untraditional-traditional" CEO comment.

Though Google has been careful to keep the two operating systems in separate camps, given that Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are now joined at the hip, and given that over the next few years Apple will undoubtedly be bringing the Mac OS and iOS together - not to mention that Samsung continues to intrude into Google's own Android space and is working hard to make headway into the enterprise that Google most certainly wants for itself with Chrome, a merger of the two operating systems has always been inevitable as far as we are concerned.

Well, that moment has arrived and Google has taken the step quickly and decisively - which is a credit to Page as this is the only way it can work. There is no real time to spare either short or long term. As Google heads into its worldwide developer conference in May 2013, we are now fully expecting to hear much more about how Chrome and Android will play out at that point. First on the agenda, we imagine, is to find a way to get Chrome to run all those hundreds of thousands of Android apps.

There is no point in speculating further at this time. Pichai will have his evangelical work cut out for him - and we will need to see how this plays out as the next step in the process. Meanwhile, Rubin will go handle his next moonshot, whatever that may prove to be.

It is possible, of course, that he has been watching Sergey Brin and his Google Glass project take off and wants to do something as potentially major as this.

Maybe.

Page's full blog post is available on Google's official blog site.