„Searching For Google CEO Sundar Pichai”
Sergey Brin und Larry Page sind nicht wirklich vorgestern ausgestiegen, sondern mit der Gründung von Alphabet Inc. vor vier Jahren. Casey Newton fand eine lustige Metapher zum Abgang (Watchman!), aber gleichzeitig auch die ernste Note.
Page and Brin’s Google was a historical triumph. But there’s little that feels triumphant about their sudden departure. The heat turned up on Google, and they decided to head for the exits. Google’s outsized success will dominate stories about their legacy. But the way they left — bored and mostly absent in a time of crisis — is part of their legacy, too.
Das Wann oder Warum ist aber auch nicht wichtig, sondern der Blick auf Sundar Pichai, der in diesem langen aber lesenswerten Feature von Mat Honan im März 2016 vorgestellt wurde.
When you think about the great leaders of Silicon Valley, they tend to fall broadly into one of three buckets: engineering, business, or product. The engineers drive innovation and invention. They make things work. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is the archetypical engineer, who built a company out of the hacker ethos. The business leaders are often the so-called disrupters. They reimagine supply and distribution, make deals in often cutthroat fashion, and corner markets. This is Apple’s Tim Cook, who pioneered supply chains in China and built the company into a financial juggernaut. The product types are those who can focus in on what makes something not just useful, but great and beautiful. They translate human engineering into humanity. Steve Jobs is the ultimate product guy. But running a massive company, like Facebook or Apple or Google, requires more than one of these skill sets.
Pichai is clearly in the product camp. Under him Android has bloomed, going from a customizable but clunky interface to something beautiful and fluid. Chrome redefined how fast and invisible a browser could be. Google Photos transformed the way photography can be organized and displayed in the smartphone era. Yet now he needs to not only focus on product, but manage Google’s massive advertising business as well.