Biography | Sundar Pichai — The Campus Where the Toolbar Manager Pushed Google to Ship Its Own Browser

People treat Chrome as if it had always been Google's browser.

In 2004 the company did not ship one.

Pichai joined Google that year, after Applied Materials and a stint at McKinsey, and was put on the small product team behind the Google Toolbar.

The Toolbar sat inside other companies' browsers and sent search traffic back to Mountain View.

Forbes reported in 2015 that it was Pichai who argued Google should build a browser of its own.

Chrome launched on 2 September 2008 as a beta for Windows.

Google published the announcement from this campus at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, the Googleplex.

Pichai led product for Chrome and later for Chrome OS.

He then took Android, Apps, and, from October 2014, product and engineering for Google's internet businesses.

The campus in 2008 was already the public headquarters.

Building 41 and the north lawns are the visitor face of the address.

This pin is the workplace of the launch, not a current private office and not a daily routine.

The later chief-executive job is a different memory on the same grounds.

What happened here in 2008 is narrower: a toolbar manager got a browser out the door, and the browser became the product that made his name inside the company.

Photo: Googleplex, north side, Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Sundar Pichai at Google I/O, 28 May 2015, Maurizio Pesce, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.