One of Google's most influential engineering executives is weighing his options at the company roughly six months after he was replaced as head of the maps group, sources say.
Brian McClendon, who was vice president of Google Maps, was replaced by Jen Fitzpatrick, another Google veteran who has been with the company since 1999 and was one of its first female engineers.
The change happened in fall 2014, around the time that Sundar Pichai was promoted to be Google's product chief, though McClendon's move appears to be unrelated.
It's unclear exactly what McClendon is doing at Google now. One person we spoke to said McClendon was "on the bench" and evaluating his options. "Pretty sure he's on his way out," the person said.
Another person close to the situation said McClendon was looking at opportunities to start a new project within Google.
McClendon was described as a "towering figure" within Google. He was an engineering VP at Keyhole, a digital mapping software company that Google acquired in 2004 and that became the basis of Google Earth. Much of the Keyhole technology is folded into Google Maps.
In 2013 McClendon was awarded the United Nations Champions of the Earth award for "harnessing the power of technology to support conservation and green economic development."
The shake-up is a big change for the maps group, one of Google's most popular products and a vital adjunct to the company's highly profitable search business. In a 2013 article in The New York Times magazine, McClendon said 20% of search queries on Google were location-specific. The ratio is even higher on mobile, he said in another interview.
Maps have become a pivotal battleground in the tech market, with Apple deciding to face Google head-on a few years ago with its own mapping product.
In 2013 Google paid $1 billion for Waze, an online mapping app that provides crowdsourced traffic information. The coexistence of two separate mapping apps within Google, Google Maps and Waze, made sense in the short-term, McClendon told the AllThingsD website shortly after the deal, though he would not say whether that would remain the case in the long-term.
There has also been some speculation that Google's commitment to the Google Earth product might be waning. The Google Earth Blog, a website not affiliated with Google, noticed in February that McClendon was no longer at the helm of the Maps and Earth group, though it did not name his replacement. The author worried that it could bode ill for the future of Google Earth and noted that Google recently made the Google Earth Pro version of the product free to the public.
"Google Earth is a wonderful product, but it needs to have as many sources of revenue as possible to justify itself to a publicly traded company like Google," the blog said. "Changes late last year to Google My Maps also weakened the tie between Google Maps and Google Earth."
Google declined to comment. We reached out to McClendon but have not heard back.
