His name may not ring a bell, but Sundar Pichai has worked on
some of Google’s best-known products — from the Chrome browser to the Android
mobile software. Chennai-born Mr. Pichai, 43, was named chief executive officer
of the Internet titan on Monday, as Google unveiled a new corporate structure,
creating an umbrella company dubbed Alphabet. Larry Page, who along with Sergey
Brin started the search engine in 1998, announced a corporate structure in
which Google will be part of a new umbrella organisation, Alphabet. Far bigger
in import was the news of the reorganisation of the internet behemoth Google
itself, which propelled Mr. Pichai to the top slot.
He will oversee the biggest company
under that umbrella, which will still be called Google and will continue to
include some of its household products, including its search engine, ads, maps,
apps, YouTube and the Android system. This organisation will also have a
collection of other ventures, many of which are big bets that Google terms
‘moonshots’. This seems a drastic change for one of the most successful companies
of the information era, a bellwether technology enterprise, a constant
innovator, and one which has billions of people using its products.
In his post, Mr. Page simply wrote, “Google is not a
conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” A distinguishing factor
for Google all these years has been its capacity and inclination to expand the
frontiers of technological innovation into newer ventures beyond its core
business. The company, which started off nearly two decades ago with the
seemingly modest ambition of providing an organised gateway to all of the
world’s information, proved hugely effective, popular and successful. Starting
as a search engine and achieving success in producing a weighted ranking of
webpages, it moved on to become a market leader in webmail (Gmail), browsers
(Chrome), video hosting (You Tube), news aggregation (Google News) and mobile
operating systems (Android), among other products.
So, while expanding, quite smartly, into adjacent areas of
its business, it also ventured into ambitious projects where pay-offs can be
expected only many years into the future: cars that are self-driven, balloons
that power internet access, technologies that slow down ageing, and so on.
Also, remaining true to its start-up roots, Google has been open to
experimentation and, therefore, to some failures (Orkut and Google Plus, to
name two of them). Sometimes this has led critics and investors to worry that
Google was spending too much time, effort and money on such experiments. The
reorganisation, led by Alphabet, may not only provide more clarity on these
differently mature businesses but also provide the leadership a structure to
think like a start-up again and not get drowned in the ‘big-ness’ of the
$66-billion Google.?
Insight Into Mr.
Pichai's Life
- Pichai earned his degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT KGP) in Metallurgical Engineering.
- He holds an MS from Stanford University in Material Sciences and Engineering and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
- Pichai worked in engineering and product management at Applied Materials and in management consulting at McKinsey & Company.
- Pichai joined Google in 2004, where he led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google's client software products, including Google Chrome[16] and Chrome OS, as well as being largely responsible for Google Drive.
- He went on to oversee the development of different apps like Gmail and Google Maps.
- On 19 November 2009, Pichai gave a demonstration of Chrome OS and the Chromebook was released for trial and testing in 2011 and released in public in 2012.
- On 13 March 2013, Pichai added Android to the Google products he oversees. Android was formerly managed by Andy Rubin.[21] He was rumored to be one of the contenders for the CEO position of Microsoft in 2014.
- He was a Director of Jive Software from April 2011 to 30 July 2013.
-Source, The
Hindu, Delhi Edition, 12th August
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