Android Ecosystem Superhero Sundar Pichai is the new Google CEO

NEW DELHI: India born Sundar Pichai has been named the new CEO of Google, as search engine giant forms new operating structures to retain leadership. Today, the company announced a new structure, and the formation of a new parent holding company called Alphabet.

Known in the world as the most powerful man in mobile due to Android and the man behind Google’s most important products, Sundar Pichai has led a number of key consumer products by Google which are now used by millions of people.

Announcing Sundar Pichai’s name as CEO, in a blog post Larry Page said, “Sundar Pichai has really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our internet businesses. Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company. And it is clear to us and our board that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google. I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations. Google itself is also making all sorts of new products, and I know Sundar will always be focused on innovation—continuing to stretch boundaries. I know he deeply cares that we can continue to make big strides on our core mission to organize the world’s information.  Recent launches like Google Photos and Google Now using machine learning are amazing progress.”

Sundar Pichai, 43, was born in Tamil Nadu, and is an IIT Kharagpur alumni. He holds an MS degree from Stanford University and an MBA from the Wharton School of the  University of Pennsylvania, where he was named a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar. Pichai has also worked in engineering and product management at Applied Materials and in management consulting at McKinsey & Company.

Google has always been an unconventional company. The ability to take risks and do some crazy projects has given the technology industry some outstanding innovations.  Elaborating on the development in the blog post, Larry Page, CEO, Alphabet (as the earlier Google is now called) stated, “In the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant. Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable.  So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity).  Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related.”