Google CEO Larry Page had some people worried last week. He did not appear at the company’s shareholders’ meeting, and it became apparent that he would not appear at this week’s Google I/O event, Google’s annual developers conference, or Google’s Q2 earnings call.
The company had indicated that Page had lost his voice. According to the Wall Street Journal, Page actually sent an email around to Google staff saying, “there is nothing seriously wrong with me,” and that he would “continue to run the company.”
The fact that Page has already been ruled out for future events, such as the earnings call, worried investors a bit, leaving some to wonder if his ailment actually was more serious than the company was leading on.
Page did post on Google+ on Saturday, as Google ran its doodle for Alan Turing:
Check out the Google homepage today in honor of what would be Alan Turing's 100th birthday.
www.google.com
I remember being completely astounded learning in my computer theory class at college that anything that you can compute can be simulated by a simple Turing machine. That simple machine is animated on our home page today.
Today we're marking the birth of a someone who is a hero to many of us at Google. Alan Turing was born 100 years ago into a world very different from our own—but he’s a founding father of every computer and Internet company today. In 1936, his paper “On Computable Numbers” introduced two key concepts, “algorithms” and “computing machines," which now rank among the most important intellectual breakthroughs of the 20th century.
In the evolution of computing, all paths trace back to Turing—so we're proud to help commemorate and preserve his legacy. In 2010 we helped raise funds to preserve Turing's papers at Bletchley Park, and recently we’ve worked with curators at London’s Science Museum on their new exhibition “Codebreaker – Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy.” And of course, we couldn't let this occasion pass without a doodle. If you visit our homepage today, you'll find a simulation of his “Turing machine"—try your hand at programming it, and read more about Turing in our blog post: http://goo.gl/ByYbV
There had been some talk late last week that Page wasn’t using Google+, because he hadn’t posted a public update since late May.
I guess Google+ isn’t dead after all.