New York (AFP)

Sundar Pichai, the engineer who has just taken over the reins of Alphabet, Google's parent company, joins the growing circle of Indian-American multinationals at a challenging time for Silicon Valley.

The 47-year-old giant, who was raised, cut-off beard, rectangular glasses, sharp-edged physicist, grew up in Chennai, South India, in a modest family where he slept on the floor of the living room.

"Friends, playing cricket in the street, reading books - it was all my life, but I never felt like I was missing anything," he said in an interview in New York Times end 2018.

A voracious reader during his childhood, he studied at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in West Bengal, before continuing his studies in the United States, Stanford University in California and Wharton School in Pennsylvania.

After starting his career at the equipment and services provider for Applied Materials electronics manufacturers and at the McKinsey consulting firm, he joined Google in 2004.

In particular, he participated in the development of the popular Chrome browser before being responsible for all the group's products, such as the Google Maps mapping service or the Android operating system.

Sundar Pichai became head of Google in 2015 when his two co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided to create Alphabet, a larger entity that also encompasses ancillary projects such as autonomous cars. He joined the board of directors of the parent company in 2017 before being appointed general manager on Tuesday.

- 'Humility and passion' -

This follower of Lanvin city sneakers is thus in the footsteps of other American leaders of Indian origin in the computer sector like Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Shantanu Narayen at Adobe Systems or Sanjay Mehrotra at Micron Technology.

The credit card issuer Mastercard is also headed by Ajaypal Singh Banga while the group known for its snacks and sodas Pepsico has long been led by Indra Nooyi.

Indian billionaire Anand Mahindra, whose empire extends cars to real estate, congratulated Sundar Pichai on Twitter on Twitter, humorously pointing out that "the product that India exports the best is probably + the boss of multinational +" .

"If only these + + exports could be monetized, India would have a perpetual balance of payments surplus," he added.

"Sundar brings humility and a great passion for technology to our users, our partners and our employees every day," say Mrs. Brin and Page in the letter announcing the change at the head of their business, created in a garage in 1998. "We could not have done better to lead Google and Alphabet to the future", add the two entrepreneurs, few present for several years in the daily life of the company but still keeping, thanks to their actions preferential, hand up on strategic decisions.

Under the leadership of Mr. Pichai, married and father of two, Google "focused on the development of products and services, optimized by the latest advances in artificial intelligence," said Tuesday the group in a presentation from his work.

Google has also "invested in new opportunities, such as Google Cloud and YouTube, and continues to be a leader in advanced technologies, including machine learning and quantum computing," he added.

"He is very intelligent and very competent, he has a very discreet and measured attitude," said Bob O'Donnell, an analyst at Technalysis Research for whom he represents a certain "quiet strength". But, according to the expert, he will have to tackle certain issues head on.

Mr. Pichai must indeed face the many controversies surrounding the current Alphabet, from its dominant position on the internet, its practices in terms of privacy, its relations with the US or Chinese governments to reproaches more and more vindictive employees on topics such as sexual harassment.

"When I came to Google I was struck by the idealism and optimism that prevailed," he said in the interview with the New York Times. If these traits are still present, "the world is different," he added. "Perhaps we have become more realistic about the difficulty of certain things."

© 2019 AFP