The internet has ingrained into our day to day life. There are currently over 1.5 billion internet users, which means, if considered as a country, the “online community” would have been most populous in the world. The amount of information that gets stored online in a year exceeds 50 times what was created in entire human history. Yet, Nikesh Arora says “you have seen nothing yet”, in an interview with Shyamal Majumdar of Business Standard, on the way exploring the Google’s Business Boss’ thoughts on online world’s migrants and natives and how advertisers are missing the bus.
Arora, the fourth most important executive at Google, after founders Sergey Brin, LarryPage and Chairman Eric Schmidt, says that online world is moving fast from migrants to natives, making net connectivity a “must-have” from “nice-to-have” just five years ago. “People like you and I are migrants in this online country. But people of my daughter’s generation are natives because they haven’t seen a world without Googleor Facebook,” he said.
So this transition of being a native in theonline country will eventually see most of the things that we know to become extinct, and his list of things includes entire media business in its current form like television advertising, which is destined to move into interactive networks.
Also, books will be dead and become just collectors’ items; Arora says “I can see this happening with my daughter who is in the ninth standard. Earlier, her books used to come in a big box. This year, she has been given an iPad. The books come loaded with it; she does her homework and submits it online, and her teacher uses cloud to access it.” He asks, “Can you imagine kids of her generation ever carrying books when they join college?”
Being a chief salesman at Google, which clocked revenue of $38 billion in 2011, he says, the challenge is how this transition, of migrants to natives, can be managed because that will impact the search giant’s revenue flow. Close to 96 per cent of Google’s revenue comes from advertisements.
Arora faced 399 rejections before getting a job at Fidelity Investments. “I thought life would be easy after doing my Masters from Boston and an MBA from Northeastern University. But here I was in an alien country — married but without a job, and living off the $3,000 that my father had sent me,” he said.
On reflecting about the time he joinedGoogle, Arora said that he was planning to do something on his own when a friend asked him in 2004 to consider joining a company that could offer a start-up kind of an atmosphere. The two Google founders conducted the interview among the artifacts of the British Museum; he says “We walked around. We looked at the exhibits and a lot of our conversation was about the Rosetta stone,” referring to an Egyptian artifact that dates to 196 BC and is inscribed in three languages.
Majumdar writes that one of Arora’s key contributions at Google has been driving revenues from other regions and building relations with advertisers. Presently more than half the company’s revenue comes from outside of the U.S. compared to just one-third when he joined eight years ago. It’s thus obvious why Google made a rare move last month, and decided to pay its top salesman $8 million in cash, instead of the previously agreed upon stock options and stock units. Arora, who made more than $23 million last year, will have to repay Google if he chooses to leave his position before April 25, 2015, the date the stock units and options will have vested.
Majumdar writes, whilst Arora at the age of 45 already been a top player at Google, and won’t he remain the tallest pygmy in a company where the founders are much younger than him? Before winding up his worthwhile conversation, he asks Arora, what’s next? To which Arora says, “Does things to undo the pattern every time his life takes on a steady pattern”. But he still loves going to office every day in a company that loves disrupting conventions, and where his colleagues are always excited about solving the most complicated of technological problems, Majumdar adds.
source::::silicon india net
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