Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai will be taking on yet another leadership mantle with his appointment as the chief executive of the parent Alphabet company. The development is a significant shake-up for the technological giant, coming at a time when Google is facing mounting scrutiny over its size, data privacy issues and the potential impact of its technologies on society.
Pichai, whose full name is Pichai Sundararajan, first became interested in computers while he was studying metallurgical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur. He later won a scholarship to Stanford, nursing dreams of one day joining the Silicon Valley. When he went for his first interview at Google, it was on April Fool’s Day in 2004. Therefore, on being quizzed about the company’s free email service Gmail, which happened on the same day, he initially thought it was one of the company’s infamous pranks.
Later, after joining the company, Pichai went on to build Google’s search toolbar as the most important product in 2006. He convinced manufacturers to pre-install the toolbar on their hard bar, warding off potential competitors like the Bing search engine.
Thereafter, he convinced Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to build its own browser, the result of which is the Google Chrome, the most used option including by Indian users. Pichai was instrumental in the integration of Android with Google.
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