Sundar Pichai

In advance of the release of Google Drive, I sat down yesterday with Google SVP of Chrome and Apps Sundar Pichai and Google Drive product head Scott Johnston. I asked them to elaborate on how Google Drive emerged from within Google, how the product compares to the competition, and where they see it evolving.

What’s ironic is that Pichai was the guy who helped kill a previous product called Google Drive, or GDrive, as detailed in Steven Levy’s “In the Plex”:

Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive anymore.” Horowitz asked why not. “Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.”

Pichai is still not a fan of files — in fact, his criticism of Dropbox and others is that they’re all about file management –  but he’s come around on “having data available in context.” Here’s an edited transcript of our chat from yesterday:

Liz Gannes: With Google Drive, you’re straddling distinctions between personal and organizational use, and personal storage versus sharing. As a user of Google Docs, Dropbox and others, I often get confused across that juncture about who can see things. How do you design for that?

Sundar Pichai: We strongly believe in the consumerization of the enterprise, and that’s the pillar of all our Google Apps strategy. At work and at home, we try to bring the same set of products. There’s some work in bridging the shift, but examples like the iPad bridge it pretty well. We have good controls in place — an admin can control when you’re using Drive within a company — but it’s an area we can do a lot more in.

Who can see what’s in my Google Drive folder?

Scott Johnston: This is a big shift, in that, really, the Google Drive folder is yours. Only things go in there that you create or that you move there explicitly. There’s a new “shared with me” view, and then you can move them into your Drive if you want. So it’s really this space that you control.

Do you see people using their Google Drive as their backup for everything?

Pichai: It’s a good question. I’m probably not the best representative use case, but the first time I got my access, I put my family pictures there, for safety and peace of mind. I don’t think that problem is well-solved today, so having a very safe, secure place to store, which is cost-affordable, I think is a good opportunity. We also really want people to have data anytime, anywhere.

So — yes?

Pichai: Yes, it’s a long way of saying yes.

What’s the team that created this project? I know Google Drive had been “killed” internally before, but what about this group?

Scott Johnston

Johnston: I came onboard Google in 2006 when we were acquired at JotSpot, and joined the Docs team. On that team, as we got better and better at collaboration on different file types, we started seeing them more and more in our everyday life; for planning a birthday party or, internally, our designers were constantly sharing mocks. And it was this idea of getting out of the way of the user so they don’t have to think about where their stuff is, and they can just do what they’re trying to do. It was a natural evolution of Docs. This is just more touchpoints to access your data.

Is there continuity with previous Google Drive products?

Pichai: What Scott’s talking about, Google Drive as an evolution of Docs, is one thing. Early on, we had a project called Google Drive that was completely different.

What was different?

Pichai: There was a very traditional file system approach, a long time ago, having nothing to do with Google Docs. It was pre-mobile, pre-tablet, with deep integration into My Documents and Windows, et cetera. So it was very different.

Why is this a good product now?

Pichai: Today, when I look at different solutions out there, those are still in the old metaphor of “here are files that you want, manage them.” This is about you living your life online — planning a wedding, buying a house — and having your data available in that context. I think it’s a big pivot, and that’s what excites me and makes it a good product. It’s in the natural flow.

I wouldn’t underestimate the fact that you can use it not just with Google but with third-party applications over time will be a big differentiator. And third is, deep search is very powerful. There is a lot of deep computer science in there, the fact that you can comment on any file type, that there’s full-text indexing with optical character recognition, all that happens magically with our infrastructure.

Johnston: There’s also being able to offer up to 16 terabytes of storage per user.

It’s kind of unusual for you to ask consumers to pay for Google products, right?

Pichai: Today, people are paying for Gmail and Picasa storage. For power users, it is popular. We’ve kind of made it very hard for you to do, but [Google Drive] is very easy. When you do upgrade here, your Gmail automatically goes up to 25 gigs. Over time, given how much Google Apps are the center of many users’ life, and you want to store safely and securely, I think it’s a good model and it’s a pretty good deal.

I know you’ve been working on Google Drive, in various iterations, for a long time. Why are you releasing it now, especially if some key parts are not done?

Pichai: We wanted all of this to be done — iOS, Gmail, etc. We picked a schedule and, like, 18 things made the train, and two got left out, but they will get added in after. The fact that Gmail got delayed and G+ made it, I wouldn’t have known a month ago.

Is this like the Chrome browser, where you guys promised a Mac version was coming soon, and then it took a couple years?

Pichai: Sorry about that. We dramatically underestimated what it would take to do Chrome on the Mac. IOS is a very different story. It works today. IOS is 98 percent done, and it will be here soon.

No matter what you say or launch, the takeaway is going to be, “Google launches Dropbox competitor.” What do you make of the competitive landscape?

Pichai: I think if we wanted to do it, we would have approached it very differently. We’ve gone to great lengths to built it around an online application experience. We want this to be about creating and collaborating — and your data is there for you. I think others have taken a file/data approach, and saying you have [access to] that everywhere. It’s nuanced, but I think it’s very different.

And for an active Google user, the integration we provide is very valuable. [As for Dropbox,]  I think the work they’ve done is great. This is a secular shift in terms of how people are living in the cloud, and I think it’s good to have innovation in the space.

Are we going to see TV ads for this?

Pichai: Not that I know of.

Johnston: The Super Bowl’s a long time from now.

Pichai: If the Niners make it.

Speaking to Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone, Page said he didn’t think former Apple CEO Steve Jobs really meant what he said about going to “thermonuclear war” with Google over Android because it was a stolen product.

“I think the Android differences were actually for show,” Page said.

Page, in fact, is above the fray of mere earthly competition, he said.

“For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe that it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what’s possible and how to make the world better.”

Page did comment a little more directly on his competitors. He argued that Facebook declining to allow Google to import its friend lists — what’s been called “contact reciprocity” — is “completely unreasonable.” He also said Google+ is exceeding all expectations, and bragged that he has two million followers. And he said that suing people over patents is “a sad thing.”

Stone asked, why aren’t big tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon working together these days?

Because it’s hard and doesn’t often turn out that well, Page replied. For example, integrating Google Talk and AOL Instant Messaging was “a tremendous amount of technical effort” that he no longer believes was worth it.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Indeed, Apple gave that rear camera a fairly meager resolution, prompting some to suspect it was included just so competitors couldn’t use its absence as a selling point against the iPad.

However, one developer may have found something decent to do with that rear camera. Levity Novelty has released an app called Invisibility that uses the combination of the rear camera and the iPad 2′s gyroscope to create a cool illusion of invisibility. The 99-cent app can take a picture of a table top and then be used to pan over that same table top, making the tablet appear to be transparent.

“The iPad has always promised it is a magical device,” Levity’s David Levitt said in a telephone interview. “Invisibility is delivering on that promise at a whole new level.”

Another developer, Total Immersion, has come up with Magic Mirror, a clever use for that front iPad camera that lets users “try on” various outfits, hairdos and accessories.

Levitt said his app has been in the works since the debut of the gyroscope-equipped iPhone 4, but said he shifted plans to the iPad 2 when it was released in March, offering a preview version of the app in April before delivering the final app this week, with a few more tricks.

Levitt said Invisibility combines a few of his passions. He said he has been working on virtual reality technology since the 1990s, when it took dual $100,000 Silicon Graphics workstations (one for each eye) to achieve realistic effects.

His app got a boost on Thursday when Wired writer Steven Levy tweeted that the app was “the coolest use for iPad 2 camera I’ve seen to date.”

“Thank you, Steven,” said a happy Levitt, who noted he brought an early version of the app to one of Levy’s recent book signings.

“It’s this wonderfully distracting, conversation-starting thing,” he said of the app.

Levitt said he plans to bring the app to the iPhone 4 and the latest iPod touch, but said it will remain an Apple-only app for now.

“In a way, we are an Apple-only shop partly because the other platforms don’t consistently have gyroscopes or an API for them,” he said. “It’s just a natural for us to stick with that, but obviously that could change.”

Some at the company apparently felt the need to get the word out ahead of mounting speculation that it would use I/O to at least elucidate a grand social strategy, if not a major social product.

The hypothesis that I/O would be a good time to talk about social doesn’t come from thin air. According to both internal plans and external expectations, Google is overdue for a major social play, even if it’s just to describe how it’s making all its products social.

Plus, Google’s social head, Vic Gundotra, is the diva of I/O. The Google leader most comfortable in the spotlight, he has been the key presenter at the last two I/O events, revving up the home crowd of Google developers with big demos, generous giveaways, as well as snarky jabs at competitors.

But, according to sources familiar with Google’s plans, the only social announcement planned for I/O is a preview of what the +1 button for publishers will look like.

The publisher +1 button, which will embed social signals within Google search results through user voting, won’t be available for a few more weeks. That’s despite the fact that +1 has been live on Google’s site since the end of March.

The final decision to hold social out of I/O was made within the last week, said sources, although it had been the tentative plan for the last month or so.

The conference plan is to focus the first day on Android, and the second day on Chrome.

The reason not to use I/O as a platform for a significant and highly anticipated project seems to be fear: Fear of hyping up expectations and fear of instant criticism and comparisons to the social giant Facebook.

There’s also a bit of superstition involved on Google’s part, said sources: The major launches at the last two I/O conferences, Google Wave and Google TV, have been flops. The company doesn’t want to have a hat trick of hyped failures.

Google made social a key part of its agenda in March 2010, when long-time executive Urs Hölzle called on the company to respond to the social challenge with a memo that Steven Levy’s “In the Plex” said was called internally “The Urs-Quake.”

The resulting mobilization was to make almost every product at Google social within a hundred days. It was code-named “Emerald Sea,” after a painting that showed a cresting wave enveloping a powerless ship (again with the fear-based motivation!).

A hundred days passed without the project being completed, so the deadline was pushed back. Then, “before the end of the year” became “April or May timeframe.” In that time we’ve only seen a trickle of social launches, most notably for Google’s search products.

Well, now it’s May, and there’s a stage ready and waiting, but Google doesn’t want to use it.

Levy talked about his new book, “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.”

Here’s his take on the search giant:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Earlier this week, BoomTown interviewed longtime author and tech journalist Steven Levy about his new book, “In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives” at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley.

Afterwards, I met Levy, who is a senior editor for Wired now, at the Plex in question–the Googleplex–to chitchat about what he learned after being embedded at the Borg, um, search giant for years.

Luckily for Levy, he was there during interesting times for Google, including its launch of the Android mobile operating system, its still fruitless struggles to get social networking to better compete with Facebook and the return of its decidedly quirky co-founder Larry Page to the CEO job.

Here’s the video of our longish chat, in which Levy opines on all that and more (and also shuts me down when I try to compare Google’s current fight with Facebook to the plot of HBO’s bloody and freaky “Game of Thrones”–without the swordfighting, natch!).

Enjoy–especially the shot of Levy on one of those multi-colored bikes Googlers ride around campus:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110421/video-steven-levy-talks-about-google-book-in-the-plex/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110215/nerd-alert-here-comes-two-more-google-books/ http://allthingsd.com/20110215/nerd-alert-here-comes-two-more-google-books/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:01:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40802

Although there have already been several big-deal books on Google already–including Ken Auletta’s “Googled,” which was bought by Hollywood for a movie–a new pair is about to debut in coming months.

One is penned by prominent Silicon Valley journalist Steven Levy, who had a lot of access to the Google and its denizens, and the other is what appears to be an insiderish tell-all by a former employee.

That would be “I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59,” which sounds naughtier than it probably is.

Reads the Amazon description of the book, coming out in mid-July, in part:

“Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to an Edsel. No academic analysis or bystander’s account can capture it. Now Douglas Edwards, Employee Number 59, offers the first inside view of Google, giving readers a chance to fully experience the bizarre mix of camaraderie and competition at this phenomenal company.”

Apparently, Edwards was the search giant’s first director of marketing and brand management, although I do not recall him at all from when I covered the company in its early days.

Actually, the book likely to get more attention–and written by someone I do know well–is Levy’s, coming out in mid-April and titled “In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.”

That would be the Googleplex in Moutain View, Calif., where Levy was ensconced for a while.

It will be interesting to see what he comes out with, given he seems to have been up close and personal for Google’s two biggest crossroads–the rise of its Android mobile operating system and the rise of social networking giant Facebook.

So too, the recent hand-over of top management from CEO Eric Schmidt to co-founder Larry Page, which will take place right around when Levy’s book comes out.

While business tomes, especially ones on Internet companies, have yet to make big bank, the topic will be much in the news then.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110215/nerd-alert-here-comes-two-more-google-books/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090211/has-your-head-exploded-yet-boomtown-queries-tedsters-on-what-they-learned/ http://allthingsd.com/20090211/has-your-head-exploded-yet-boomtown-queries-tedsters-on-what-they-learned/#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:30:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=9615

While at the TED conference last week, I asked a variety of people in attendance at the elite gathering which presentation had blown their head off. Figuratively, of course!

TED–for Technology, Entertainment and Design–had an eclectic range of speakers and tony digerati parties at its new location in Long Beach, Calif.

Onstage, there were a lot of talks about the awful state of the earth at TED, which sometimes feels like a four-year college in four days.

But there were also less-dire presentations, like the one from “Eat, Pray, Love” hit author Elizabeth Gilbert about genius, and another on how Brad Pitt’s head and range of facial expressions are now stored in a studio database for all eternity (as part of his work on the movie, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”).

That’s a cold comfort amid all the global melting down, but BoomTown will not refuse it.

I also got reaction from some other TED attendees to the event. Included in the video are: Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Foxmarks’ James Joaquin, Craig Donato of Oodle, Mozilla’s John Lilly, VC Dave Hornik, Steven Levy of Wired, entrepreneur Bill Gross (showing off a future car) and techie Linda Stone.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

And here is a video of my tour of TED action.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090211/has-your-head-exploded-yet-boomtown-queries-tedsters-on-what-they-learned/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080917/kara-visits-burdas-dld-luncheon-in-silicon-valley/ http://allthingsd.com/20080917/kara-visits-burdas-dld-luncheon-in-silicon-valley/#comments Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:23:35 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=3881 Yesterday, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg and I jumped into the BoomTownMini and took a road trip down the lovely 280 to Palo Alto’s MacArthur Park restaurant for a lunch thrown by Germany’s Hubert Burda Media.

Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), which a lot of U.S. tech types have gone to, including me, even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts.

But Burda has also been dipping into the digital sector a lot, especially via the tireless tech networking of the company’s Steffi Czerny and Marcel Reichart, who have established a high profile for the company among Silicon Valley denizens.

That was in evidence at Burda’s luncheon yesterday, which was crowded with a panoply of techies and hosted by Czerny, Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, and well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

Czerny has been taking Maria Burda (pictured here, she is also a famous German television star, better known as Maria Furtwängler) around the Valley on a learning tour this week to meet with companies like Ning, Mozilla, Facebook, and with venture capitalists. They are also here to attend Google’s Zeitgeist partners’ event, which starts today.

Here’s a video of yesterday’s luncheon, where I was asking everyone about the troubled economic situation and more.

It includes chats with Mullenweg and Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur, BillShrink’s Peter Pham, Facebook’s Brandee Barker and Randi Zuckerberg, Wired’s Steven Levy, Vardi and Burda and Czerny:

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080917/kara-visits-burdas-dld-luncheon-in-silicon-valley/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20070627/ddv20070627/ http://allthingsd.com/20070627/ddv20070627/#comments Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:00:36 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070627/ddv20070627/

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20070627/ddv20070627/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070626/iphone-reviews/ http://allthingsd.com/20070626/iphone-reviews/#comments Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:00:54 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070626/iphone-reviews/
Today may well have been your last chance to buy shares of Apple for under $120. The first reviews of the iPhone (by journalists actually allowed to test the device) were published on the Web at 3 p.m. PDT today and seem to be generally positive, with the typical caveats about Apple’s choice of cellphone carriers. Interestingly, some of the issues that were initially cause for concern seem to have fallen by the wayside. Indeed, two of the three reviewers below actually seem fond of the device’s virtual keyboard and all of them found its new screen to be durable.

We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions. … The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.

–Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal

The phone is so sleek and thin, it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese. The glass gets smudgy—a sleeve wipes it clean–but it doesn’t scratch easily. I’ve walked around with an iPhone in my pocket for two weeks, naked and unprotected (the iPhone, that is, not me), and there’s not a mark on it. … But the bigger achievement is the software. It’s fast, beautiful, menu free, and dead simple to operate. You can’t get lost, because the solitary physical button below the screen always opens the Home page, arrayed with icons for the iPhone’s 16 functions. … Apple says one battery charge is enough for 8 hours of calls, 7 hours of video or 24 hours of audio. My results weren’t quite as impressive: I got 5 hours of video and 23 hours of audio, probably because I didn’t turn off the phone, Wi-Fi and other features, as Apple did in its tests. In practice, you’ll probably wind up recharging about every other day. So yes, the iPhone is amazing. But no, it’s not perfect.”

–David Pogue, New York Times

If you’re looking for quibbles, flaws and omissions, you’ll certainly find them in this first version of the iPhone. (I’ll get to these below.) But the bottom line is that the iPhone is a significant leap. It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding. The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge. … In a sense, the iPhone has already made its mark. Even those who never buy one will benefit from its advances, as competitors have already taken Apple’s achievements as a wake-up call to improve their own products. But for all its virtues, the iPhone is still a risky venture because it’s yet to be proven that, despite the wow factor, millions of people are ready to pay several hundred dollars more than the going rate for phones—and in some cases, paying even more to bail out of their current mobile contracts.”

–Steven Levy, Newsweek

After months of hype, Apple has delivered a prodigy–a slender fashion phone, a slick iPod and an Internet experience unlike any before it on a mobile handset. Still, iPhone isn’t perfect, or even the most ideal smart phone for every user. It’s pricey. It lacks certain features found on some rival devices. AT&T’s coverage was spotty in some areas I tested it in. Your employer may prevent you from receiving corporate email on the device. … On the data side, [iPhone] works through AT&T’s Edge network, which is pokey compared with third-generation, or 3G, data networks used with other phones. At times, I fell off the Edge and lost coverage. Even at its best, Edge never felt close to the broadband-type speeds I experience on my home network. Assuming Apple gets around to supporting 3G in the future, you’d ultimately have to buy a new 3G-capable iPhone for improved network performance, not that Apple is ready to announce one.”

–Edward Baig, USA Today

No, Apple is most certainly not ready to announce a 3G-capable iPhone, as this call-and-response Q&A between Walt Mossberg and Steve Jobs demonstrates:

Walt: When will there be an iPhone that runs on the fastest, so-called “3G” networks?
Steve: Walt, you know we don’t talk about future products. Again, Wi-Fi is far faster than 3G networks.
Walt: Will you follow the pattern you set with the iPod and bring out less costly models? If so, when?
Steve: We don’t talk about future products.
Walt: This first model is missing some features some other smart phones have, like video recording, instant messaging and real-time GPS navigation. Do you plan to upgrade iPhones purchased now so they have these features? If so, when?
Steve: We don’t talk about future products.

Over at Valleywag, Nick Denton’s whipped up a helpful chart scoring the critical consensus on the device.

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