Eric Schmidt Eric Schmidt Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer. He is known for being the Executive Chairman of Google from 2001 to 2015 and Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017. In 2017, "Forbes" ranked Schmidt as the 119th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of US$11.1 billion. As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt did a complete re-write of Lex, a software program to generate lexical analysers for the UNIX computer operating system. From 1997 to 2001, he was Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Novell. From 2001 to 2011, Schmidt served
Samuel J. Palmisano Samuel J. Palmisano Samuel J. Palmisano (born July 29, 1951) was president and the eighth chief executive officer of IBM until January 2012. He also served as Chairman of the company until October 1, 2012. Palmisano was appointed president and chief operating officer (COO) effective in October 2000. He was promoted to CEO in March 2002, while retaining the title of president, and named chairman effective January 1, 2003. Palmisano announced on October 25, 2011 that he was stepping aside as president and CEO. He was succeeded in these positions by Ginni Rometty. As of 2009 IBM was the largest