Sundar Pichai talks about Covid-19, Pixel and more

‘Hardware is hard’, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in the interview.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai also talked about collaboration with Apple.  (REUTERS)

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way the world functions. Google, like other companies, too has been affected in its own way by the outbreak. From employees collaborating remotely to the company launching products and services to mitigate the impact of the outbreak to a delay in product launches, the company, like others, has made a fair share of adjustments over the past couple of months. Now, Google CEO Sundar Pichai in an interview with The Vergecast talked about how Google was dealing with the pandemic, including its collaboration with Apple.

When asked about how the plans of the company to reopen its offices as the lockdown norms across the globe start to ease out, Pichai said that while the company would adopt a conservative approach for the broader company, the overall approach would vary with teams.

“When the local ordinance allows, I think we'll probably start with trying to get 10 to 15 percent of the company back, prioritizing people who actually kind of need to be there,” Pichai said adding that by the end of the year he expects the company's offices to be at 20 to 30 percent capacity. “Which may still mean we are able to get 60 percent of our employees in once a week, or something like that,” he added.

Apart from talking about reopening the company's offices, the Google CEO also talked about collaboration with Apple.

To give you some context, Google announced a partnership with Apple last month as a part of which the two companies would use Bluetooth technology to reduce the spread of the virus.

“It started, I think both of us saw the problem and saw the opportunity to do something, and the teams had started working on it,” Pichai said on connecting with the Apple CEO Tim Cook for the joint effort.

“And so we realized as platform providers, we really want to make it easy, and to make it work at scale, obviously with user consent and privacy protection. And the teams started talking, they saw an opportunity to do it better, so Tim and I connected, and we talked, and we said, “Let's announce it jointly.” That helps clarify that we are going to approach it consistently,” he added.

During the podcast, the Alphabet Inc CEO also talked about the company's hardware portfolio including its Pixel smartphones.

“Hardware is hard. And it definitely has components, which take real time to get it right, thinking about underlying silicon or display or camera or any of those tacks. And so we are definitely investing in it, but that timeline. I think we've made a lot of progress,” Pichai said on being asked about sluggish Pixel sales.

“We are definitely going to have hiccups. We are a nascent player in a really complex space, so not everything's going to be smooth. But am I excited about our portfolio for later this year,” the Google CEO added.