As Google's third CEO, Pichai is taking over a
company in flux. In a massive corporate
restructuring, Google has become a subsidiary of
Alphabet, a new company run by Google co-
founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Pichai, 43, was born in Tamil Nadu, India. After
graduating college in India for metallurgical
engineering, he came to the United States to study
at Stanford University -- the alma mater of the
Google founders and so many other early Googlers.
Pichai got his start at Google in 2004, building the
now defunct Google toolbar. The toolbar allowed
Internet Explorer and Firefox customers to make
Google their default search engine .
In the next few years, he took over Chrome,
Google's Web browser. When he introduced Chrome
to the world in 2008, the world reacted with
puzzlement: How could it compete with Internet
Explorer and Firefox?
Yet Chrome eventually became the world's most
used Web browser. Chrome even became a
successful operating system for Chromebook
laptops, used mostly by schools.
Pichai eventually became vice president, then senior
vice president in 2013 when he added Android to his
growing portfolio.
Last year, he became Google's product chief,
overseeing virtually all Google software products
not named YouTube. He runs Google+, Google
Wallet, Android Pay and Google's Apps services for
businesses.
Pichai also runs the Google I/O developers
conference, where he serves as the public face of
Google for eager customers waiting to know what
the next versions of Android and Chrome will do. He
also shows off the company's biggest new products
and services, including kicking off this year's
massive Google Photos announcement.
Subdued and generally quiet, Pichai is admired at
Google not just for his obvious engineering talents
but also his general likability.
"Sundar has been saying the things I would have
said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time
now, and I've been tremendously enjoying our work
together," said Page in a blog post announcing the
move.
As CEO of Google, he gets one more feather in his
cap and adds a few more products to his now giant
kingdom -- search, ads, maps, apps, Android,
Chrome and YouTube will now all be under his
purview.
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