Globally Integrated Enterprise 2

In my post on the Globally Integrated Enterprise (June 2006), I reported a comment by James Martin about the growth of the Indian CEO. A few years later, Megha Bahree reported Eight Indian CEOs At Big U.S. Companies (Forbes, December 2009). Now both Microsoft and Google CEOs were born in India. See Harmeet Shah Singh, India-born CEOs are taking the U.S. by storm (CNN MoneyInvest, August 2015).

@juliapowles notes that the relationship between Google and Microsoft started to improve in September 2015, shortly after Sundar Pichai became Google’s chief executive. Coincidence?

Meanwhile, the relationship between Google and Oracle remains tense. Google has just won the latest battle in the ongoing legal war over its use of Java code in the Android operating system.

In case you were wondering, Oracle does not have an Indian CEO. Unusually, it has two CEOs - an Israeli woman and an American man - as well as Larry Ellison remaining as CTO and executive chairman. (Not exactly normalized, eh Larry?)

Mark Hurd and Safra Catz in 2010

Photograph by Paul Sakuma/AP Photo

Ms Catz has been leading the Oracle legal battle against Google. No doubt she has Mr Hurd's full support ...

 

Update (2021): Mark Hurd died in 2019, and Safra Catz is now sole CEO of Oracle.

IBM now also has an Indian-born CEO. Amol Rajan has recently interviewed Sundar Pichai for the BBC. Perhaps there are interviews with Arvind Krishna and Satya Nadella in the pipeline?

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Diane Brady, Oracle Hunger Games: Larry Ellison Creates Co-CEOs (Bloomberg, 19 September 2014)

Julia Powles, Google and Microsoft have made a pact to protect surveillance capitalism (Guardian, 2 May 2016)

Nicky Woolf, Google wins six-year legal battle with Oracle over Android code copyright (Guardian, 26 May 2016)

Claire Zillman, With co-CEOs, companies flirt with disaster (Fortune, 20 September 2016)