The fact that this news arrived on April Fool's Day gave me pause, but it appears to be legit. (Although All Things D confirmed this news twice, VentureBeat confirmed through a source Merrill's departure from Google, and News.com's Elinor Mills confirmed the Google and EMI angles, I hereby reserve the right to update this post with conflicting or correcting information.)

The news: EMI has hired away Google VP Engineering Douglas Merrill to be its new head of digital.

This is the kind of culture clash that will be written about for years to come. I hope somebody is going to do a Harvard Business School case study on Merrill's attempt to overhaul EMI's digital department and help transform the company into the next-generation media company imagined by Guy Hands.

Reading on Merrill:

• February 14, 2008 interview with InformationWeek. "The CIO of tomorrow is not a business service person; the CIO of tomorrow is a technologist who understands business in a different way. The job I get to have, and I think is increasing prevalent in industry, is I get to find new ways to enable people to be more effective. I get a job which says, 'What are the business problems we have to solve and how can we transform them?' and that's a fundamentally different skill set."
• March 18, 2008 interview with the Wall Street Journal.
• Merrill's bio at the Google website

Side note: Someone at TechCrunch left the comment, "Roger federer is now the president of EMI? That has to be an april fools joke." Yeah, he does look like Federer!