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.