BUSINESS MANDATE
fountainhead of excellence
1 APR 2022
BUSINESS MANDATE
fountainhead of excellence
41 APR 2022
Dr Suresh Ramanathan, Dean & Principal, Great Lakes Institute of Management, in conversation with Mr T T Ramgopal ‐ Global Head, Android Partner Engi‐ neering, Google.
Dr Suresh Ramanathan: Companies like RCA, Kodak and RadioShack were behemoths in their own right, at one point in time. Yet they seem to have lost their way and some have even receded into the annals of history. What gives Google the longevity that it enjoys right now? TTR: The companies that you mentioned were around for 100 years. They have been through World Wars, multiple depressions and so on. Google is 22 or 23 years old and it is just a young adult. So I cannot compare Google with those companies. However, if you look at Google in the technology timeframe, I would say it has done really well. We have an approach of launch and iterate.
the creation of a tech centric product. When we launched it, it had a lot of errors and bugs in it and over the years, we constantly reiterated and made it a much better product. Similarly Chrome. The world didn't need another browser. This is something that Sundar Pitchai had actively worked on and we have over a billion users today for Gmail and Chrome.
The strength of analytics The other aspect is our analytics. We look at data very closely and see how products are performing and where the issues are. We have built a very robust analytics background into it. We had a product called
Why did we create Gmail, when it was just another
Google video. It was a very early version, where people
email product? A few engineers said they found it
could load some videos and share them but it was very
difficult to understand conversations and how they tied
clunky and there was not much adoption at all.
to each other and that it would be nice if they were clustered together. The second issue was storage. We built this big cloud with a lot of storage, so you don’t have to constantly delete emails because you run out of space on your local machine. Some of these led to 42
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We found a start-up ‘YouTube’ did well in this. We paid what seemed then a huge price to pay to acquire YouTube and now we have billions of views every day, with thousands of hours of videos being uploaded every minute. The analytics informed us that our own
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product was not working. So we had no fear in acquiring and replacing that.
Fail well
We bet on technical insights. Google's overarching mission is,
The third, we fail well and fail fast. When we sunset
to organize the world's
a product, there is this sunk cost fallacy. Teams and
information and make it
users get disrupted, yet we haven't shied away from doing it. Picasa, the photo sharing app is no longer
universally accessible and
there but Google photos is there. It took a lot of efforts
useful.
to transition users from one to the other. We put a lot of time and effort to make sure we don't hurt the end users but we are not afraid of making some of the bold changes.
From our side, it was a very risky move because most
If you don't cannibalize yourself, somebody else will. When I first came to head the Google ads business in India, we noticed there were a lot of advertisers who were not logging into their ads account for a year but were spending every month. This was not giving them any returns at all. So I thought why we should be taking money from them. We contacted them and told them they were spending this money without any benefit.
companies would not even touch their holy cow revenues coming in. Many of our advertisers were very happy that we told them about it and shut the accounts down. Others were very happy that they learned about it and spent more time, optimizing their ads campaign. So we ended up at the same level or better.
BUSINESS MANDATE
fountainhead of excellence
43 APR 2022
Think 10X The last one, we encourage everybody to think 10X. Think big, think of big problems, think of radical
solutions and think about breakthrough technology.
The DNA of the company is very much engineering driven. A lot of our investments go into
We have a self-driving car. Google is not a car
R&D.
company but there are millions of people who are unable to drive because they are either physically challenged or really old and very constrained. We wanted to solve this problem. We have machine learning and we have a great vision. We asked: can we do this in a scale? Now, the Google cars have driven millions of miles. We have solved some of the hard problems through technology and some of it through analytics. We studied and found out that 53% accidents happen when people make a left turn (in India, when you make a right turn). We had to spend a lot of time on how to optimize that user journey. So we constantly
Computing. We invest heavily in them. However, there are companies like Amazon that are highly customer focussed. For a company like Google to work, we have a few fundamental things. We invest in building scalable platforms. We bet on technical insights. Google's overarching mission is, to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and
cannibalise, check, iterate and launch.
useful. It's a fairly straightforward mission. But that means a lot of things to a lot of people. Companies like Netflix, for example, were prepared to disrupt themselves before someone else came in and disrupted them. What is Google's approach about innovation? Large companies typically tend to innovate by listening to its existing customers or potential customers. Invariably, the type of innovation that happens tends to be sustaining or incremental, trying to improve an existing product to such a point that it exceeds customer needs. In Google, do you listen to your customers or to your engineers? Google is first and foremost an engineering driven company. It has a highly engineering culture. The first several hundred hires at Google were all engineers. The DNA of the company is very much engineering driven. A lot of our investments go into R&D. Fundamental engineering work takes up a lot of the investment—be it in the cloud, building the open-source Android platform or creating text-to-speech or speech-to-text technology 44
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or
AI/ML
technology
or
Quantum
The user-led innovation can come from anywhere. There are 400 million people who are hearing impaired. It is a very big disadvantage for them. Not more than about 20% of them can afford to have training, go to a university, learn sign language and get hearing aids. Among the rest of the population, very few people know how to use the sign language and communicate with them.
User‐led innovation We have an engineer by name Dmitri who went deaf at an early age. He worked in the speech research team. We have the Android phone which is available all over the world. We have speech-to-text engine and multilanguage support. A group of folks figured out how they can build a product that can help Dmitri. It was
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not a top-down. We don't have an innovation officer. A
Android ecosystem that has 3.5 billion users. We had
bunch of people organically created and built a
amazing phones from Palm and Nokia. The Symbian
prototype. Once it was validated, that team got
Nokia phone was well ahead of an Android phone. By
investments to make this a legitimate product. It's
the way, iOS produces some amazing products. I also
called Live Transcribe and it's freely available in 50
use an iPhone though I'm an Android Developer. So I
languages. It gives deaf people an opportunity to be
am well aware of both the products.
more empowered.
The fundamental thing we have in Android is we want to make it easy for developers who can write one
Now there is a battle for standards; in other words, one who drives the dominant standard in the whole technology ecosystem matters a lot. For example, Blu‐ray versus HD DVD—Blu‐ray became the dominant player. We have Q‐ LED from Samsung vs. OLED from LG. Over time, one standard becomes the dominant standard around the world. Yet we see this very interesting divide in the world, where in the rest of the world Android probably dominates 72% and iOS has 28%. In the US, it has flipped around with iOS being 59% and Android about 41%. How does Android manage to fight this battle of standards? The question isn't so much about standards because iOS / Apple is a closed ecosystem. Everything is vertically integrated from the chips that they make, all the way to the iOS software. Then we have the
application and it will run on any phone from any manufacturer, whether it's a 35$ phone or 1300$ phone. Of course, the performance may be different across those devices. We had the Symbian and Microsoft Office, and each platform was different. The developers had to build an app for each of those platforms and maintain them. They had to pay for the license. With Android, we have it as open source. Anyone who wants to use it can use it. We have also put Google applications on it. The developers follow API compatibility. This also allows innovation to happen. Many OEMs are developing
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45 APR 2022
products based on Android. Thus, Android became
really big.
The cell phone market is highly commoditised. The margins are
Supporting the OEMs
very low. So to distinguish their
There is also a healthy competition between all
products, the phone makers
these OEMs because each of them wants to have a
have a better camera, better
better camera or a better screen. Android supports that.
user experience or better
The OEMs add their own secret sauce on top of it. So
sharing.
that's how Android has succeeded. There's a lot more of work that goes behind it. My team has to work with over 400 OEMs building devices and also chip makers like Qualcomm and Mediatek. It's a huge ecosystem and it is very complicated trying to get everybody to move in one direction. iPhone has it easy compared to us because of their one unified approach in one thing alone. Every year, we try to corral this ecosystem and make it move forward. It has been a very challenging but interesting journey.
framework and to the UI in order to smoothly transition the home screen as it expanded. It was very difficult and they have big demands on the Android engineering team to support them. Chinese OEMs came out with different demands. You use the three-button navigation on your Android phone. But a Chinese OEM had the gesture navigation.
At least four years before the iPad was launched, Microsoft had the technology for a device on which you could write with your fingers and flip pages. I've taught a Harvard case based on that. Microsoft chose to market that device as a laptop plus an additional feature, as they had existing relations with Compaq, Fujitsu and others. Apple was not constrained by any such things. Today your grandmother can play Candy Crush on the iPad. How does Google manage to get the cell phone manufacturers and others to think about innovation at the cutting edge rather than simply doing incremental stuff?
You can the flip it back and forth and up and down. I told the OEM when I met them in Hong Kong that such demands would completely break the developer ecosystem. They didn't listen. They went ahead and launched it in China. We came back with a lot of data that this was working. Now we have adopted this as part of the platform and you have a choice when you set up your phone whether you want to use gesture navigation or the three-button navigation.
In Android ecosystem, innovation has been happening not from within but from outside. The cell phone market is highly commoditised. The margins are very low. So to distinguish their products, the phone makers have a better camera, better user experience or
Does enough innovation reach the bottom of the pyramid? Are underdeveloped worlds and underdeveloped economies getting the benefit of the developments? This is a question that needs to be addressed.
better sharing. It is either hardware or software
We have Android phones with a low cost to a very
improvement. A year before, there was a company that
high cost. We have 2 GB RAM phone or a 16 GB RAM.
had a rollable product. It wasn't a foldable one. You can
The performance differs. We have invested a lot to
roll it in and out. We had to do a lot of changes to the
make sure the operating system works well in the low
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several immersive weeks with the users of the phones
If you build for India, you can
to observe and understand how they used them. One
build for the rest of the world.
of them went to a family who was a daily wage earner.
Though data is cheap in India,
The children were sent to school. The mother and
we have connectivity issues
father were not literate. They did not know what the
here. So we have eliminated a
teachers wanted their children to do. We created an app
lot of dependency on the cloud and created ‘on device‐AI/ML’
called ‘Bolo.’ When the child reads out the lesson, the app will detect if every word is read out correctly. We also have an app called Google Lens for text
model.
recognition from a camera image.
The phone can
convert the text to voice. With this, a mother can scan the progress card of her child and the app will convert end phones too. The other part is the apps. We have studied the use cases to make useful apps work in lower end phones also. For maps and YouTube, we have light weight apps called Maps Go and YouTube Go. We have done a lot of work to make the apps work in the local market. Like I said earlier, if you build for India, you can build for the rest of the world. Though data is cheap in India, we have connectivity issues here. So we
it to voice, so she can know about the marks scored by her child in every subject. People can use it for a variety of applications like reading a train time table or reading a bus number. We launched a phone called Jio Phone Next. In that, you can launch the camera and walk around the world and experience whatever is written by selecting your preferred language. The phone will read out to you whatever is written.
have eliminated a lot of dependency on the cloud and created ‘on device-AI/ML’ model.
Tell us about the culture at Google. What makes it tick?
Many users have language and literacy problems
I am reminded of a Peter Drucker’s quote that
and they have difficulty in operating the phone and
culture eats strategy for breakfast. I have been with
understanding the messages. If we can use voice to
Google for 15+ years. When I joined, we had 8000
operate, that will be very easier for such people. So we
people. Now we have 160,000. The company has grown
voice-enabled the entire phone. Today, smartphone has
twenty fold. Obviously, culture changes and it evolves.
become a super computer and people use to make
Yet, fundamentally certain things remain the same.
payments and do many other transactions. Security of transaction is therefore very important. So we have
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We have a fairly unique and democratic hiring
made sure with the OEMs that security updates are available to all the users at least once a quarter, so that privacy and security are not limited only to the rich but to everybody.
process. We don’t look at just deep technical knowledge. We also want to make sure that those who join us are adaptable, have team management and leadership skills. Can I sit with
A bunch of passionate Googlers went out and spent BUSINESS MANDATE
them
and
make
an
interesting
conversation?
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47 APR 2022
We have a panel that looks at these things
Android had created huge problem and my
quite objectively. The recommendation of the
inbox was flooded with emails. 300 million
panel goes to a hiring committee. It slows
users could not use their phones. It was quite
down the process but we take the recruitment
a disaster and we gracefully recovered within
process very seriously.
24 hours. Instead of firing the few people who
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We also look at D&I.
set the wrong configuration, we had a
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We set stretch goals to our engineering team
blameless post mortem to figure out what we
also. What is important for us in not what you
learnt from it. We improved the processes.
do but how you do it.
The person who messed it up had, in fact,
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Team dynamics is very important.
helped us to fix it. We have open hierarchy.
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By default, we are very open. Our software and
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Every week, I have certain non-office hours
promotions are all peer-reviewed. People can
where any employee can discuss anything that
nominate themselves for a promotion. It goes
he/she wants to discuss. We expose people to
through a committee that evaluates their
this culture from the time we hire them. We
performance. We also have peer feedback.
also listen to them as they come with
Take action and beg for forgiveness if
different perspective. We even encourage
something goes wrong. Last year, during
them to tell us what is wrong with us.
Covid, one of the updates we had done to the
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All these make Google’s culture a different one.
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