Google Names Morgan Stanley Director As CIO

Google has a new CIO: Benjamin Fried, a managing director in Morgan Stanley's technology department.

"We're pleased that Ben will be joining us as our new CIO, and we look forward to him starting in May," a company spokesperson said in an e-mail.

In an e-mail, Fried said that he was still a Morgan Stanley employee and could not speak to the press on behalf of Google.

Fried replaces Douglas Merrill, who left Google earlier this month to run EMI's digital music business.

According to his Columbia University Web page, Fried worked on early Web software developed by NASA and CERN.

Fried joined Morgan Stanley's technology department in 1994. He says on his Web page that his application infrastructure group is responsible for software development, e-commerce, and knowledge worker productivity.

As a partner in Berkeley, Calif.-based Fra' Mani Handcrafted Salumi, Fried also has some knowledge of traditional Italian pork products. It's not clear whether his familiarity with sausage-making will come in handy at Google, but at the very least Fried should have no trouble adjusting to the fine food available at Google's highly regarded cafeteria.

Fried is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and serves on the editorial advisory board of the ACM's Queue magazine. He confesses to a fondness for Ultimate Frisbee, though he seldom plays now on account of bad knees.