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Earthquakes, even metaphorical ones, often come in waves. We experienced a major set of the latter here in Silicon Valley recently when three tech giants, Apple, Google and Hewlett-Packard, announced big shake-ups in their leadership.
First we learned Apple's co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs would again step back from running the company to focus on his health. Chief operating officer Tim Cook will oversee day-to-day operations until further notice. Unlike the last time this happened, Apple offered no projected date for Jobs' return, a worrying change for a company so reliant on its visionary CEO for its success. The news was released on a holiday in the US, but sent Apple stock down as much as 6% in European markets.
Then, at Google, long-time chief executive Eric Schmidt stepped down to become executive chairman, leaving co-founder Larry Page to run the company. Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard said it was switching out a full third of its board of directors, an extraordinarily broad shift at the company's highest level. Three big transitions at three of Silicon Valley's most successful companies, all coming out of the blue in the course of little more than three days. What's going on?
Well, that earthquake metaphor can help. Earthquakes occur when two of the planet's tectonic plates shift past each other after years of being stuck fast. In some areas, they stick for decades before finally snapping. The resulting quakes are enormous. Elsewhere, fault zones are more slippery and the quakes are more frequent but not quite as intense.
Apple's quake was of the slippery kind. Reports of Jobs' health woes have jolted the company several times already. They've reminded us that Apple's founder is mortal and must one day be separated from the company he built. This latest news just sent Jobs and Apple a little further along the divergent paths they inevitably must travel. For years, seismologists have wondered if you could avoid the really big ones by deliberately setting off a series of smaller earthquakes first, and something like that was going on here.
Apple's timing gave US markets a day to absorb the news, and was shared the day before it revealed blowout quarterly figures (sales up 71% to $26.7 billion (£16.8 billion), profits $6 billion) that quickly mollified a rattled market.
Google's big news was similarly well-managed, coming alongside its own set of stellar quarterly results (revenue of $6.3 billion, net income $2.5 billion, up 29% from the year before).
Those numbers begged the obvious question of why Google was switching leaders when it is performing so well. But to many it was no surprise.
Google is widely seen here as having grown into a massive, lumbering bureaucracy, substantially shorn of the drive and direction that made it great.
Most damning is the growing impression that it is getting steadily worse at its core function, search. It's not that anyone else is doing search much better, but its not hard to see Page's elevation as an attempt to return Google to its scrappier roots, the better to pre-empt assaults that, if Google remained in its current state, might not so much shake the company as shatter it to the point of destruction.
The last big jolt, at HP, was again company-instigated, but this time wasn't so much a quake in its own right as an aftershock from an earlier one caused by the unexpected departure of chief executive Mark Hurd last August.
That event was preceded by a series of board-related dramas stretching back almost a decade. The predominant local view is that this latest shift was an effort to shake things down to a point where the plates causing these regular seismic slippages on the board were again locked undramatically together, at least for a while.
"Is this the HP board that will allow us to stop thinking about HP's board?" asked Arik Hesseldahl of technology blog AllThingsD.
The tech industry offers its greatest achievers a famously unsteady crown. Its corporate giants can be brought down by young upstarts or hard-charging competitors in stunningly short order (think AOL, Netscape, Excite, Silicon Graphics, Sun, AltaVista).
Anyone with an ounce of success in Silicon Valley has to assume, then, that the ground will shift inexorably under them over time. Inevitably, tensions will build between what they have managed to build and the degree to which it meets the needs of their customers better than anyone or anything else.
That happens in any business, of course, but the Valley is business on steroids. The rises are swifter, more meteoric, the falls faster and more precipitous than almost anywhere else. If you are smart, you work braced for the seismic shifts that are bound to come. And you position yourself aggressively, despite the discomfort, to soften the bigger hits you know you'll receive from your competitors down the line.
In that light, each of the recent leadership shake-ups, as much as they rocked a set of very nicely humming corporate machines, was essential.
It's apposite, if not causative, that the tech industry's heartland is built right on top of the highly unmetaphorical San Andreas fault. That too can shake mightily any time.
