Google's Larry Page puts Sundar Pichai in charge of key businesses

Ten years after joining Google and with running Android, Chrome, and Google Apps already on his plate, Sundar Pichai's star has now risen even higher, gaining a new tranche of responsibilities in the process.

On Friday afternoon, Google CEO Larry Page sent out a memo, seen by Re/code, advising staff that in addition to his current jobs, Pichai will now have overall responsibility for search, research, maps, commerce, ads, infrastructure, and Google+ – not that the last one will take up too much of his time.

The six executives in charge of newly added product areas, who previously reported directly to Page, will now report to Pichai. The move, the Recode report said, seems born out of Page’s concern that Google will become less innovative as it ages. In a memo to staff, he noted that the changes will create less of a bottleneck and also help him focus his attention on existing and new products.

Sources told the magazine that Page spoke to the staff in meetings about the changes and that he wants to focus on the “bigger picture” but is unable to do that with so many reports and a myriad of duties related to each product unit. Page will continue to directly manage business and operations, including access and energy (a new unit run by Craig Barratt), Nest, Calico, Google X, corporate development, legal, finance and business (including ad sales).

Pichai is widely recognized outside of Google. One of the major competitors of Google — micro-blogging site Twitter – tried to recruit him for a key product role. His name was also considered while the search for a new CEO of Microsoft was on.  Before he joined Google in 2004, Pichai worked at Applied Materials and at McKinsey & Co. He studied at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.