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SiliconAngle's editor John Furrier tweeted that talks with Pichai "are so tight under wraps" that it could explain why Pichai's name had so far not surfaced for the CEO's job. Furrier retweeted that a second source had just confirmed that Pichai "is the dark horse coming out front runner". But reputed tech writer Kara Swisher, who was the first to put out Nadella's name on Friday, tweeted that her sources we re clear Pichai - who was born Pichai Sundarajan - was not in the running.
Despite the emergence of a dark horse, most Silicon Valley tech writers and pundits believe Nadella is still the frontrunner. The race cannot get bigger than this for India's technology talent: a storied global tech giant looking at two Indian-origin executives to lead the company at a time when it is losing mindshare to rivals Apple and Google and needs urgently to reinvent itself.
Nadella, as The Times of India reported in its front-page lead on Saturday, is a 22-year Microsoft insider who now heads the company's $20-billion cloud and enterprise group. Pichai got a BTech from IIT-Kharagpur before going to the US for an MS from Standford University and an MBA from Wharton School.
Under Pichai, Chrome has had an extraordinary run. In May 2012, Chrome became the most-used browser in the world, surpassing Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which had been the leading browser ever since it o usted Netscape from that position in the late 1990s.
Pichai's big advantage is the huge successes he's had in the consumer space of internet and mobile devices -- where Microsoft has lagged behind and needs to play serious catch-up with the likes of Google. Nadella's experience is mostly in enterprise - but his big plus is the 22 years and the variety of roles he's had in Microsoft, a sprawling giant of 100,000 people (to be 132,000 once Nokia's mobile phone business is merged) that doesn't accept outsiders in top jobs easily.
Nicholas Carlson of Business Insider, a business news site, wrote an article in September last year about Google's culture, where he said: "Pichai made his career at Google convincing computer manufacturers to install the Google Toolbar, which put a Google search window on the desktop of hundreds of millions of computers worldwide. Pichai is a dealmaker, a consensus builder. Perhaps his ascension is a sign of the kinder, gentler, more coope rative Google to come."
But Pichai and Nadella are just two among thousands of Indians who are making a difference to the global tech industry. There's a saying that in Microsoft, Google and just about every other tech company in the US, if you throw a stone, there's a very good chance you'll hit an Indian. Vinod Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems and remains one of the biggest investors in the US. Romesh Wadhwani founded several successful tech ventures, and now runs the Symphony Technology Group, a private equity firm. Gururaj Deshpande founded Sycamore Networks and the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT; Pradeep Sindhu, Juniper Networks; Bharat Desai, Syntel; and Padmasree Warrior is the chief technology & strategy officer at Cisco. Meanwhile, Nikesh Arora is senior VP and chief business officer at Google and Vivek Gundotra, who's called Google's Social Czar, is the man behind Google+.
Many of these names are from the IITs, as indeed are thou sands of others in senior positions at US tech companies. It is estimated that around 60,000 IIT alumni currently live in the US. The Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani is another institution that has played a significant role in US techdom. Sanjay Mehrotra, who co-founded SanDisk, and Preetish Nijhawan, who co-founded Akamai, are both BITS alumni.
A study by the US-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found that Indians account for 33.2% of immigrant-founded engineering and technology companies started between 2006 and 2012. That number was up from 26% in 2005. "Significantly, Indians have founded more such companies than immigrants from the next top seven immigrant-founder-sending countries combined," the report said.
Kanwal Rekhi, Indian-American entrepreneur and investor, said, "Indians have definitely arrived in the technology field. There is no issue with respect to technical capabilities and leadership qualities anymore. At the time I was being considered as CEO at Novell in 1992, there were many doubts about Indians as potential CEOs. Whether Wall Street will accept them was a big concern. We already have an Indian CEO, Shantanu Narayen, at Adobe, a top tier software company. Satya's elevation to CEO of Microsoft will be a feather in the community's cap."
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