Israel’s global perspective on technology makes it “one of the most successful
markets in the world” at finding opportunities outside its own borders, Google
senior vice president Nikesh Arora said during a brief visit here this
week.
“This is one of the most tech-value markets, and not just from an
in-market situation, but also from the way the Israeli market looks at global
technology,” he said during a meeting with reporters in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.
“The Internet has opened up opportunities outside local markets, and it’s fair
to say that the market that leverages that the most and uses that the most is
Israel.”
Arora, who is also the Internet giant’s chief business officer,
stopped in Israel during a tour that included Turkey and his native India. He
called Google’s R&D centers in Tel Aviv and Haifa “phenomenal,” comparing
the situation with his previous visit in 2005, when he established Google’s
Israel office and had just one local employee, regional director Meir
Brand.
Arora rejected criticism of Google raised in Steve Jobs’s recently
released biography, in which the late Apple CEO is quoted accusing his rival of
copying his company’s smartphone operating system rather than creating through
its own technology.
“Firstly, I think Steve Jobs was a phenomenal
individual,” Arora said. “I think he inspired a lot of entrepreneurs and I
presume inspired a lot of people in this country [Israel] to be
entrepreneurs.
We all have to tip our hat to what he was able to
achieve.
“But that having been said, I firmly believe that Google has
created amazing innovations in the market, whether it be Chrome, whether it be
Android, or whether it be what we’ve done with YouTube since acquiring it, or
what we’ve done with search. Many of those things are what people would call
innovative, and I think we will continue to be innovative in the
future.”
Jobs is quoted as saying in the biography: “I will spend my last
dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion
in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a
stolen product.
I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on
this.”
Arora said he doesn’t understand the statement that Android isn’t
new, saying that “the base of innovation of smart-phones has been significantly
increased by having an open-source operating system.”
Samsung, LG and
other smartphone manufacturers had also benefited from this “innovative business
model,” he said.
Arora also addressed questions about the company’s
social strategy, saying that Google was not attempting to emulate Facebook, but
that it was becoming increasingly important to show that its products “were
becoming more social.”
He pointed to the social network Google+, which
was launched four months ago and already has 40 million users, as proof the
company is headed in the right direction.
“We want to be more social,”
Arora said. “We realize people want more social products, they want to be able
to share more things among their friends, and that’s where the trend is.”