Sundar Pichai: People live in the cloud 98% of the time

Sundar Pichai, the man in charge of Google Chrome and Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, spoke to exclusively during his trips to India over the last couple of years. Excerpts from interviews done between 2011 and 2013.

Chromebooks are beginning to take off. What's driving it?

It's cloud-based. In the bring-your-own-device to work scenario, when people walk into office with devices on different platforms, how do you give endpoint solutions to each of them. So we have to move to the cloud. The existing model doesn't work. With Windows you need a lot of effort to keep it running. Chrome has a zero-administrative model.

How's the adoption of Google Apps by businesses?

We sign around 4,000 new businesses every day. About 60% of the top 100 universities in the US are on Google Apps. The benefits of doing collaborative work on Docs is so mindblowing, the answer is clear for most people.

How is it in enterprises, especially now with Microsoft's Office 365 cloud offering?

Even in enterprises we are growing at an extraordinarily fast pace. Just that there's a large legacy market, so it will take years. But the trend lines are very favourable. I'm excited to see Microsoft take a huge step towards the cloud. But for us, when people think of Google Apps, they are not comparing features. It's a much broader bet they are placing, that the apps will work well together, seamlessly, wherever they are and whichever device they are using. So I don't see Office 365 changing this one way or the other.

How's Gmail doing?

It's doing well, especially in India. We have around 50 million unique users here. There have been some articles that Gmail is No. 1 in the US, though we are not the ones saying that. We recently improved the mobile version for Android and iOS.

Any impact of social media on emails? 

No. The email inbox is a personal queue, where we take note of many things and processes. But social media is a stream and there is no need to see everything. There are areas where they overlap.