The former South African farmer who became an HP, Apple, and Google executive

John Solomon is Google’s top man in charge of ChromeOS, the company’s resource-light operating system designed for high performance and long-lasting battery life on lower-end hardware.

Solomon has been vice president of Google ChromeOS and Education since May 2018, and although most of his career has been spent in the US, he is a born and bred South African.

Solomon grew up on a farm outside Nelspruit in Mpumalanga and attended high school at St. Alban’s College in Lynnwood, Pretoria.

From 1983 to 1987, he studied and completed a degree in industrial engineering at Stellenbosch University.

His interest in tech was truly set alight in 1990, while doing a Master’s in Business Administration at the University of Washington in Seattle in the US.

“I was obviously interested in tech, to some extent, doing engineering,” Solomon previously told MyBroadband.

“But I really got interested in ‘new tech’ when I got exposed to what was happening at Microsoft and the software and hardware businesses.”

After a brief stint as a marketing intern at Egghead Software, he was recruited by HP as a senior buyer.

Over the next three years, he served as a quality engineer and senior financial analyst before returning to South Africa to work on his family’s farm in Crocodile Valley.

Solomon described the experience as “great” but acknowledged that he missed tech.

“If I’d farmed for five years, I might have struggled to get the ‘tech lords’ to take me back,” he joked.

After three years of farming, he went back to the US to work for HP as product manager,.

What followed was a 14-year career at HP, during which he served in various managerial and executive positions in Portland, San Francisco, and Singapore.

His last three years at HP were as senior vice president for personal computing and print in the Americas region and general manager of the consumer printing global business unit.

Brief jump to Apple before big Google move

Solomon moved on to Apple in January 2015, where he served as vice president for enterprise and government for two years.

His primary responsibility in that role was to sell Apple’s products to big corporates.

After leaving Apple, he served on various boards before Google approached him and expressed its intention to have ChromeOS become a game-changer in the OS market.

Solomon told MyBroadband that this idea resonated with him, particularly because it was coming from Google, which had a “healthy disregard for the status quo.”

“If you think the status quo is not good and you can do better, you are encouraged to change that,” he said.

“I felt like growing up South African, that was how I saw the world.”

Solomon attributed his father’s approach to farming to his adoption of this philosophy.

“He was a very progressive farmer and changed a lot of things in farming practice,” Solomon said.

“I grew up with the view that you can make the world better, but you need to have a long-term view, and you need to have patience.”

Solomon told MyBroadband he was proud to be South African and kept his connections to the country strong.

ChromeOS under Solomon

Under Solomon’s leadership, Google has grown its Chromebook offering substantially.

The devices saw explosive growth during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2020, Chromebook sales surpassed Apple Macs, largely due to demand for affordable, easily-manageable laptops for remote working and studying.

In more recent years, ChromeOS’s market share has shrunk,

In an interview with PCWorld’s Mark Hachman, Solomon explained one of the reasons behind this trend.

He said that about 60% of Chromebooks are used in education, 30% by general consumers, and 10% in enterprise.

Solomon said that demand in the education sector — ChromeOS’s main target market — tended to be cyclical.

While 2020 and 2021 brought big growth, 2023 and 2024 were slow years.

One of Solomon’s main focus areas in the coming years will be equipping Chromebooks with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

That will include using on-device processing as opposed to cloud-based processing.