Vic Gundotra

Who is Vic Gundotra?

Vivek "Vic" Gundotra is the Senior Vice President, Engineering for Google and was previously the Senior Vice-President of Social Business for the same company. Before joining Google, he was a general manager at Microsoft. He joined Microsoft in 1991 and eventually became General Manager of Platform Evangelism. His duties included promoting Microsoft's APIs and platforms to independent developers and helping to develop a strategy for Windows Live online services to compete with Google's web-based software applications. Gundotra joined Google in June 2007, after taking a one-year delay working on charitable endeavors due to a Microsoft employee non-compete agreement.

His responsibilities as Vice-President of Engineering include Google's mobile phone applications, and its developer efforts, including OpenSocial, Google Gadgets, Google Gears, and the more than 40 product APIs Google exposes. It was reported on Gigaom that he is considered to be Google's Social Czar. He is apparently known to be the man behind Google+, and is responsible for the controversial removal of social features from Google Reader.