Readers of The Hitchhiker?s Guide to The Galaxy know that the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. Google Fellow Amit Singhal shies away from venturing a guesstimate to so large a query. But in a conversation with FE?s Chanpreet Khurana, Singhal talks about apps that will feel like science fiction, seeking simple answers to difficult queries such as just how many books there are in the world, what drives the Google innovation machine, why the company pulled the plug on Wave and the impetus for the recent spate of acquisitions by the Mountain View, California-headquartered company.

Edited excerpts:

Google has made several acquisitions since the beginning of this year, including of ITA, Bumptop, Agnilux and, most recently, Jambool and Slide. How does the company expect these will add to its posse of services?

When it comes to acquisitions, we mostly look at small, technical teams doing interesting things in the areas in which we operate, including cloud computing, mapping, search and advertising. As a recent example, at Google, we?re committed to making the Web more social, including helping third-party sites add social functionality as well as giving people new ways to interact within our own products.

As we invest even more in the social Web, Slide?s very talented team will be instrumental in building new and better ways for people to share information and interact online with others.

The company recently announced it was shelving Google Wave as a stand-alone product. What triggered that decision?

Google Wave was a very innovative way of communicating when it started, so we invested in it. But user adoption is at the end what makes a successful product. It may be incredibly innovative technologically, which Wave is, however, the user adoption was not what we expected. We decided not to develop any more on Wave. However, things that we did develop in Google Wave will migrate into our other products and will become a resource. So Wave as product in itself may not have succeeded as wildly as say Gmail did or Google Maps did; but the technology, when you push the envelop this hard, then something comes out.

Let me give you an example, when we said when someone tweets, we want it to show up on Google?s results page in one second, we were able to do it in three seconds. When you push the envelop hard, even though you may not succeed in exactly what you are after and that as a product may not be perceived as the greatest success, but whatever you build?like in Wave we built the real-time update technology across multiple people?you would see them migrate into appropriate products.

Did Google do enough to aid user adoption?

In my experience, if you have to read a primer before using a Google product, then it is hard to make it successful. Given the mass usage we have, our products need to be intuitive.

Google recently said there are 128 million books in the world. How does it pinpoint what questions to ask?

The key behind Google?s innovation machine is the fact that anyone who joins Google is on an equal footing to innovate like anyone else. They can ask questions of their colleagues with experience in books, even experience in space planning for that matter. So when you come in as a new engineer in Google, you say, ?Hey, how about this idea?? Everyone has wonderful ideas. The innovation machine works by us giving a lot of latitude to people.

What has your experience with Android been like?

The beauty of an open system like Android is that anyone can write apps, and that includes Google engineers. So Google Sky came about by some engineer thinking, ?Oh! I am into astronomy. I want to look at how stars are organised.? So he went ahead and wrote a map layer first, and then developed Google Sky for Android. Another person from my team built the My Tracks application. It tracks where I have been walking, tells me when I go for a run how much distance I have covered, and where I have been. This is the innovation game. Android apps will be very prolific going forward. And Googlers will develop it and people outside Google will develop it. And that is what is exciting about Android?its openness, and the ease with which you can develop the designs.

What I do envision for the apps development scene here and elsewhere is a play between hardware and apps.

What role do you see cloud services playing going forward?

Cloud is going to be critical for the future. This is because even though Moore?s Law can pack more transistor into a chip, there is a fundamental limitation that human beings cannot withstand if the mobile device generates more than 3 watts. And human beings are not evolving at the rate of Moore?s Law?it is not as if I can withstand 4 watts tomorrow and 8 watts the next year. So pretty much the power consumption limit on a device such as your cellphone is fixed. As you would require more processing from your phone, all that capability requires processors and not all processes can be packed in under 3 watts.

And the way India is investing in its mobile network, I am very proud of that. That allows people to connect. Mobile devices are coming down to as low as Rs 2,000. And then you connect that to thousands upon thousands of computers and numerous watts available in a data centre somewhere. That is when you have the power of the world in your pocket, which is so much fun.