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Google's Kordestani: We'd love to continue partnership with Apple

Edward C. Baig
USA TODAY
Omid Kordestani of Google

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. — Now in his second stint at the company, Iranian-born Google chief business officer Omid Kordestani carries a weighty descriptor: "our business founder." He is also a Google board member and listed as a "special advisor" to CEO Larry Page.

With such responsibilities, Kordestani weighed on a number of wide-ranging topics:

-- On Google's mobile search relationship with Apple, Kordestani said he'd love to continue its partnership. It's not yet up for renewal.

-- Google has indexed 30 billion links within apps.

-- Some 90% of commerce is still offline. But mobile devices are perfect for discovery and comparison shopping. "The focus for us is figure out how do we make this friction go away," he says. There is going to be a "buy button" soon.

-- As for YouTube, "You'll see business model evolve. Watch time and mobile usage continue to increase. We've got to do a better job of monetizing, bigger and better."

How does Google get more profit out of Android? Kordestani says Google has much more diverse set of offerings than say Apple but it is through partnerships and the company doesn't control the end to end experience like Apple. Monetization comes through search.

-- On self-driving cars. He says monetization will also come to self-driving cars but Google is more likely to license the technology rather than build them.

-- Kordestani says Google doesn't focus on the stock, but rather users and partners and "the rest works itself out," he says.

On diversity: We're all terrible on it. We're spending $150 million on it this year.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com Follow @edbaig on Twitter

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