It’s Now Officially Sundar Pichai’s Show At Google

Welp, journalists got some inbox candy on a Friday from Google. An invite to an event on September 29th. What will the event be about? Is it hardware? Has to be hardware! Is it software? Has to be software! Is it…yes. It has to be that, too.

My point is that it doesn’t even matter what they launch: Google has had hundreds of product launches, and it will have hundreds more.

Whether Sundar Pichai turns up for the event will be the most important thing about September 29th. It marks the first major event since he became the CEO of Google. In fact, it’s only been about a month since that happened. The truth is, though, Pichai has been working his way up to this point for a long long time.

It’s his show, now.

We don’t know if Pichai is even going to participate in the event at the end of the month, but if you are listening Google (are you there?), I think it’s extremely important for that to happen for a number of reasons.

Strength

Google is its “own thing” now under Alphabet. If Google is announcing products of any sort at the end of the month, Pichai better be there to show the strength of this new entity.

It’ll be very important to see Pichai interact with his colleagues as the head honcho, it’ll be important to hear his words in the context of guiding the entire company for the next ten plus years.

Lack Of Larry Page Is A Plus

For a plethora of reasons, not that we know any of them in particular, Larry Page isn’t the most social CEO in tech. In fact, every single time I see Mark Zuckerberg chatting with some folks in a public setting, I feel like Google’s lack of similar interactions hurt them. Even when Eric Schmidt was CEO, he was still a businessman. Pichai is the anti-Page/Schmidt in this sense. Pichai is the product and a people person.

While we all know that Page is one of, if not the, masterminds of Google’s best years, the fact that he chose Pichai to take the helm at Google spoke volumes. He passed the baton.

Internal happiness

This is Google’s chance to show the company, and the other units under Alphabet, that all is well, everything is under control, and Pichai is the CEO for the reason. Pichai basically auditioned for this exact moment at I/O last year, where Google co-founders Page and Brin were nowhere to be found.

But hey, maybe Pichai doesn’t show up at all. Maybe he gives the stage to whomever is launching what. However, everything we’ve seen about the modest and savvy showman, tells us that he’ll seize this opportunity in his new role. There’s a lot of folks who wouldn’t mind seeing him there keeping everything moving along all Googley-like. Whatever it is they’re talking about that day.

Comments

The EHang 184 Is A Human-Sized Drone Taking Off At CES

We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff on day 1 of CES 2016, but probably nothing more eye-catching than the EHang 184, a human-sized drone built by the Chinese UAV company EHang . Yes you heard right — a giant autonomous drone that fits a human. It’s basically what you would expect to see if someone shrunk you down to the size of a LEGO and stuck you next to a DJI Inspire. Except no one was shrunk, and the giant flying machine was sitting smack in the middle of the CES drone section. EHang, which was founded in 2014 and has raised about $50M in venture fundingto date, was pretty gung-ho about telling everyone at CES that the 184 was the future of personal transport. And for the most part, people were too in awe to question them. But the reality is that the company probably was using the 184 as more of a marketing tool for their standard-sized drones like the Ghost . Not that we’re saying that the 184 will never be a real thing, just that it probably isn’t co...

Western Union Brings Money Transfer And Its Tricky Fees To Chat Apps

Remittance has always been a shady business. Migrant workers need to send money they earn home to their families, but get hit with fine print fees so less cash comes out the other side than they might assume. Remittance companies earn extra by keeping the margin between their own made up exchange rate and the real one. Western Union is the best known remittance company, with 500,000 brick-and-mortar locations around the world. But tech startups like TransferWise, Azimo, and WorldRemit are gunning for the business. They hope to increase convenience and reduce fees to lure customers away from Western Union, Moneygram, and other old-school remittance providers. So Western Union is going digital thanks to partnerships with big messaging apps. It launched its Western Union Connect system in October last year, followed by a partnership with WeChat for sending up to $100. Now it’s getting into bed with Viber , which has over 664 million “unique” users, thou...

Google Calls Out EFF Over Bogus Claims That It Snoops On Students With Its Chromebooks

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) caused quite a stir this week when it alleged that Google is using its Chromebook platform, which has made a significant impact in the education sector, to snoop on students. The charges were damning, with the EFF claiming that Google was violating its own corporate policies and using students’ personally identifiable browsing data/habits to refine its services, in addition to sharing that data with partners. "EFF bases this petition on evidence that Google is engaged in collecting, maintaining, using, and sharing student personal information in violation of the 'K-12 School Service Provider Pledge to Safeguard Student Privacy' (Student Privacy Pledge), of which it is a signatory,” alleged the EFF in its initial FTC complaint. Google takes such allegations very seriously, and has thus responded to every claim brought forth by the EFF. “While we appreciate the EFF’s focus on student data privacy, we are confid...

Following Patent Deal, Every Time Apple Sells An iPhone, Ericsson Gets A Bit Of Money

Telecommunications infrastructure company Ericsson just announced that it has reached an agreement with Apple over an ongoing patent dispute. For the next seven years, Apple will pay a fraction of its iPhone and iPad profit to Ericsson in royalties. Back in February, Ericsson filed suits in many different jurisdictions for patent infringement (the International Trade Commission, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, as well as courts in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands). According to the Swedish company, Apple has been violating 41 patents over the past few years with its iPhone and iPad, in particular patents related to GSM, UMTS and LTE technologies. As expected, the two companies have reached an agreement and Ericsson is dropping all of its lawsuits. Today’s news isn’t particularly surprising as Ericsson holds more than 35,000 patents. Many of them are related to wireles...

Android Oreo vs iOS 11: What’s different and what’s the same?

Google just announced Android Oreo and it packs a handful of new features. Some are at the system level and speed up the system and extend the battery life, while others are features that will change the way users interact with their phone. A lot of these features should be familiar to iPhone and iPad owners. Normally Apple is the one accused of copying Android, but for Android Oreo, Google lifted a handful of features straight from iOS, while a couple of new functions are hitting Android before iOS. Notifications Google cribbed iOS for Android’s new notification scheme. In An...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog