At one point in his career, Sundar Pichai said that Google get to work was a bad idea. And it was bad enough to try to convince one of his friends to follow the path of the startup was a risky bet, at least more stable employment than they had in McKinsey & amp; Company, a consulting firm specializing in management and administration issues.
During his talks with his friend, Pichai found his own arguments against working in Google were lazy, or at least not as solid as I thought, and for the April 1, 2004, the engineer was inside the company. His first task was working on equipment that improved the search bar of browsers. A modest work, perhaps, but of vital importance, as have a constant presence in the user’s browser was, somehow, ensure traffic to the Google search engine and, through it, to the lucrative advertising business online.
Pichai is a mild-mannered person, whose speech, rather than being full of energy, far from being impulsive, it is a matter carefully and weighed, at least in public. Yes, today is the CEO of Google, and during his career has been in charge of some of the products that are central to the lives of millions of people, but his words remain a matter weighed, well polished arguments. A man who, despite being powerful, is not afraid to doubt, stop and think.
And much of his thought is always tied to the solutions from the computer, it can pose problems facing of modern life, full of information, interconnected, complex and essentially chaotic. Several years ago, in front of a packed auditorium, Pichai paused and took the time to answer a question: “What is my view of the search engine? I believe that through him we can offer a narrative of the interests and concerns of humanity. And this is a powerful tool to understand where we can be most effective, where the problems are and consider new ways to solve them. “
So, you’ve started working on the computer finder in search bar, perhaps not an accident. Nor was the next evolution in his career: being part of the team that designed Chrome, the browser
At first, Chrome was a gamble, because the market was dominated by Internet Explorer (from Microsoft. ) and Firefox (Mozilla Foundation).
But in the minds of Pichai, develop a browser was just a natural step if you want to attract more traffic to the search engine, and to the rest of the business Google to work closely with the search engine. Steven Levy account “In the Plex,” his book on the history of Google, which initially both Larry Page and Sergey Brin (co-founders of the company), offered an unofficial support to the idea of building Chrome; Eric Schmidt, by then CEO, was opposed, considering that enter the browser market would be an expensive and time-consuming affair.
One of the major requirements that the draft had Chrome from the beginning (a condition imposed by Page and Brin, she says Levy) was that the new browser should be fast, really fast: it was to provide the best possible browsing experience, but also the most immediate search access and, Hence, to the world’s information.
To shorten the story, Chrome is now one of the dominant browsers industry and one of its main advantages is still loading speed. But it does not stop there, because Chrome is also the name of an operating system present in low-cost computers that only in 2013, accounted for 21% of PC sales in the US.
“The software is a time when you are solving more problems than at any other point in history,” Pichai said in a recent interview with The Verge. Chromebooks (the name of these computers) are perhaps one of the products that best reveal what engineer concerns: a computer that is not a computer, but the Internet embodied in an object that looks like a computer. A PC that has almost no storage space and whose operating system is basically a browser.
Maybe it sounds strange, but is consistent with the vision of Pichai, who approaches problems thinking how the vast processing power of Google can shape a solution that can be implemented on a large scale, virtually anywhere; two requirements that are almost synonymous with the Internet, so make a PC running on the network is essentially something almost logical and obvious.
Pichai was born 43 years ago in India. His father, an electrical engineer, said his son since childhood curiosity expressed by his office, which nurtured his interest in technology and the sciences. After college, Pichai entered the Indian Institute of Technology to study engineering and then jumped through a grant towards a master’s at Stanford in 1993.
Although initially ambitions leaned toward the chase a career in academia, Pichai did not continue the trail blazed toward a doctorate at Stanford and chose to start working. After a time he acquired a Master of Business Administration in 2002, and shortly thereafter was to be found trying to convince his friend not to go to Google.
In 2013, after the success Chrome (the browser), among other things, Pichai was the man responsible for leading the division of Android, the mobile operating system company is now actively used by more than one billion people on a variety of devices, including phones and tablets around the world.
The former head of this department, Andy Rubin, the founder of Android (company that was acquired by Google in 2005) and led the development of the mobile platform through a managerial style, but achieved success in the market, it was closing doors within Google. The truth of the matter, it seems, is that those doors were closed for the same Rubin, who isolated Android from almost any other division within the company.
One of the first functions Pichai in front of Android was open communication and collaboration with other company products. And this, like as with Chrome, has two good reasons: integrate the supply of Google’s most popular mobile system in the world means more traffic to these services (many of these correlated with lucrative advertising line), but also tries to offer as much computing power to solve daily issues users. Integrating Android and Now (version personal assistant Google), which was announced at the last conference of developers, is only one example of this approach.
“More than one billion people actively use Android. This is the first computing platform that really reach new users who have never had an internet connection or a computer in your hands. It is the way to solve problems on a large scale, “in the words of Pichai own.
For many, choosing Pichai as CEO of Google is just a natural thing, because ultimately this is a person deeply involved with the products of the company and whose vision is to provide a better user experience, but also finding new ways to apply technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to everyday tasks that millions of people made through their phones or the search engine, now embedded in almost every aspect of daily life.
No comments:
Post a Comment