Larry Page | MediaGuardian 100 2012
Job: co-founder, chief executive of Google 1997-2001, 2011 to date
Age: 39
Industry: digital media
2011 ranking: 3
This year Larry Page has mostly been the strong, silent type – because an (unspecified) illness affecting his vocal cords led to his doctors ordering him not to speak at all. (He is now well enough to talk again.) But even without speaking, his influence over the past year has seen Google morph from being a search portal into a content and hardware company.
Thus YouTube is commissioning original films, while the Google Play marketplace is tying up a growing number of film and music companies to sell or rent their products to users of the Android mobile software, which powers an increasing number of smartphones. In June Google completed its $12.5bn takeover of mobile phone and set-top box maker Motorola Mobility; in August it bought Frommer's, the travel guides company, to add to its purchase in 2011 of ITA, the airfares and routes planning company.
Page's principal focus since he took over from Eric Schmidt at the start of 2011 has been, in his phrase, "more wood behind fewer arrows". Dozens of underperforming products and services have been closed, while the company has pushed services like Google+ – the "social layer" that is being thrown over all its existing products (including search) – even if it earns the disapproval of others, including Twitter and Facebook.
Under Page, Google has not been afraid to be unpopular with its peers if it means expanding its influence with its users. But it has also begun easing its sometimes prickly relationship with the content business. While it successfully opposed the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in the US, which ranged it against film and music lobbying, its announcement in August that pirate sites would be pushed down search results follows many years of lobbying by media companies, and shows the human fingers in Google's search results; they aren't pristine or machine-made.
The shift to mobile, which is troubling every big digital media company including Facebook, is also a challenge for Google, which gets less revenue per ad – but the success of Android, which powered about two-thirds of smartphones shipped from April to June this year, looks like the bridge to success there.
However, there have been setbacks too: a change to its privacy policy in January, to combine data about individuals from its sprawling properties (and hence improve revenues) was unpopular with legislators and commenters, though the public seemed mostly unmoved. In the UK, the Daily Mail has nagged at privacy questions over gathering Wi-Fi data while collecting Street View images; in the US the investigation of that collection led to a $25,000 fine from the Federal Communications Commission, while the Federal Trade Commission exacted a $25m fine after ad-tracking cookies were placed on iPhone and iPad users' systems despite security blocks. (Google did not admit guilt in the latter case.)
Advertisers will also be watching closely for the outcome of its negotiations with the European Commission - which has an ongoing antitrust investigation into how it pushes its products (such as YouTube) into search results, whether ad campaigns can be taken to rival search engines, and "scraping" of other content sites. But the past 12 months will best be remembered as the time that Google stopped being just about search - even though that is still its dominant business, with ads from searches generating 97% of revenue.
Even so, no beast is as influential in the media world. Its UK advertising take – about £2.9bn in the past four quarters – makes it the biggest on the block, and there are only a few places in the world where it is not the dominant search destination – and the world goes where Google sends it.