Three challenges awaiting Sundar Pichai

Juxtapositions stability and challenges await Sundar Pichai who takes charge as the new CEO at Google.

Chrome, a product that Pichai led, dominates browser segment with 56 percent market share, surpassing close rivals Internet Explorer and Firefox.

But there are three key challenges the IIT Kharagpur alumni will have to tackle.

1. Ensure YouTube’s dominance as a video broadcast platform

2. Weave a stronger social media strategy &

3. Breathe life into Google+

YouTube: comScore, a global player in digital measurement and analytics, which released key trends in the US smart phone industry for September 2014, reported that Facebook ranked as the top smart phone app, reaching 72 percent of the app audience, followed by YouTube (51.5 percent), Google Play (51.1 percent) and Google Search (47.3 percent).

Facebook is fast gaining ground. The social media major began seeding autoplay videos into the News Feed, shortly followed by premium autoplay video ads; and it is actively trying to poach YouTube users to create content on its platform.

According to a report in Business Insider, YouTube's dominance of the worldwide video market is under threat as Facebook continues to ramp up its charge to increase its share of the lucrative online video market.

For the last decade YouTube has had a virtual monopoly over online video views - YouTube is almost as much of a verb to video as Google is to search - but soon it could be in the middle of an existential crisis. This isn't just a niche specialist video app with the potential to carve off 5 percent or so of users, this is Facebook, which already has 1.35 billion monthly active users at its disposal to tempt away from YouTube when it comes to their video needs, the report cautioned.

Desktop video views on Facebook grew 38.5 percent year on year to 491 million in September 2014. Views across Google's sites were up 4.8 percent to 831 million. YouTube is still dominant, but Facebook is savagely nipping at its heels, Business Insider noted.

Pichai's challenge therefore, will now be to ensure sustained innovation in search, turning YouTube into the world's leading broadcast platform and keeping cash flows happy.

Social media: Think defunct social media and one can immediately associate the term with Orkut, Wave and Buzz with Google.

Google launched Wave in September 2009, as a real-time collaboration and communication tool with email and instant messaging integration. It was taken down in August 2010 due to low user adoption rate. Google Buzz met a similar fate. Launched in February 2010, Buzz was another social network from Google, loosely inspired by Twitter but without any character limits. Google officially killed it on 15 Decemeber 2011. Some of its features were integrated with Google Reader, Picasa, Google Lattitude, YouTube and Blogger.

Orkut was launched ten years ago but failed to kick-off. It too was put to rest because the social communities simply were not interested. It faced stiff competition from Facebook which was also in its infancy in those days, but offered better UI and was more user-friendly.

Google Plus: is also struggling to make a mark against Facebook and Twitter. Pichai needs to figure a way out.

Four years after Google launched Google+, the search engine giant’s response to growing social media frenzy over Facebook and Twitter, it decided to give Google+ a new avatar.

Bradley Horowitz, VP, Streams, Photos, and Sharing, posted in his blog post, "While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we have needed to rethink. Google will add new features like Google+ Collections, where users can share and enjoy posts organized by the topics they care about. At the same time, it will move some features that aren't essential to an interest-based social experience out of Google+.”

Google has to buck-up or it will skip one of the largest growth drivers of recent times—video.

According to comScore, 180 million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, versus 157.2 million on Facebook in May 2014. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes.

And this is the crucial differentiator advertisers would look at!!!