Dating coach Wayne Elise once said women don’t want an engineer who looks like an engineer, they want an engineer who looks like a record producer. In that case, women will want Douglas Merrill. The eminently progressive CIO of Google is leaving his illustrious post to become President of EMI Digital Business on April 28.
Yes, it’s a shocker: a clueful guy who looks like a surfer dude jumping from a rising company in a rising industry filled with smart people to a troubled company in a troubled industry filled with dumb people. As he said in an interview today, he …read more

Besides cracking jokes and looking like a surfer, Google CIO Douglas Merrill also serves as a model of enlightened tech management. The Wall Street Journal interviews the man who built tech infrastructure for the most tech-savvy employees on the planet.
We’re a decentralized technology organization, in that almost everyone at Google is some type of technologist. At most organizations, technology is done by one organization, and is very locked-down and very standardized. You don’t have the freedom to do anything. Google’s model is choice. We let employees choose from a bunch of different machines and different operating systems, and [my support …read more