Pichai Sundararajan, better known as Sundar Pichai, has just been announced as the next CEO of Google which is now a subsidiary of Alphabet, a conglomerate of companies founded by the same duo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, companies such as Calico and Life Sciences.
Sundar Pichai's promotion to Google's top job continues the trend of global technology giants' bosses being Indian immigrants, a trend which was started with Satya Nadella becoming the CEO of Microsoft.
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| Sundar Pichai |
An extremely brilliant IIT Kharagpur Metallurgy Engineering passout, who moved to the US and attained a degree of Master of Science from Stanford University as well as a business degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Sundar Pichai formerly worked as an engineer at Applied Materials and later moved to management consulting at McKinsey & Company, before joining Google.
He led the team which created the Google Chrome browser, the most used search engine. In 2013, Larry Page handed over the responsibilities of Android to him. He is a visionary and has great relationships with people, something which Larry Page could see. Pichai also oversaw the development of Google apps like Gmail, Calendar.
Sundar Pichai inherits the top job at a time when Google is facing great competition from Facebook and Amazon. Inspite of Google's varying range of products, it's main source of income comes from advertising, but there are growing concerns over the fact that people are switching from desktop screens to mobiles more, as a result of which the industry has seen a decline in 'costs per click'.
People like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella proves that meritocracy is still valued in this world where India, inspite of producing tech talents in thousands are not being able to keep them in the country because of internal politics and a clear discrimination. It is high time a sense of mentorship is introduced in the tech companies in the country, just like Larry Page has been mentoring Pichai for so long before making the call.
