Google Is Reorganizing Under a New Company Called Alphabet

[onehandle]

Source: New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Google was born as a company that did Internet search. Over time, it has broadened its interests into everything from drones to pharmaceuticals to venture capital.

Now Google is changing its corporate structure to reflect that it has essentially become a holding company with a disparate collection of businesses.

Larry Page, co-founder and chief executive of Google, said in a blog post on Monday that he was creating a new company named Alphabet that he would run along with Sergey Brin, the other co-founder of Google.

Alphabet is to act as a parent entity, with several other companies operating under the structure. The biggest among them would be Google. In addition, Alphabet is to house other businesses such as Nest, the smart thermostat maker, and Calico, a company focused on longevity, among others.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/technology/google-alphabet-restructuring.html

---

The death knell for Google has been sounded.

[Agschmid]

1. Kick.

[Xithras]

2. Death knell? Hardly. People have been predicting something like this for years.

Google is, first and foremost, a web technology company. As they have continued to invest outside of that core technology area, they've been acquiring a lot of technologies and subsidiaries that have nothing to do with web technologies and don't fit well into their corporate structure. Nest is a great example. Smart, socially connected thermostats are an interesting technology, but they don't really have anything to do with the Web. Their investments in driverless cars, biotechnology, and medicine likewise have nothing to do with finding things on the Internet. Having a web search company manage these technologies and subsidiaries makes less and less sense as their numbers grow.

Generating a new umbrella organization to oversee all of the various projects frees up Google to work on its core web and platform technologies AND helps the subsidiaries as they no longer have to fight to justify their existence in a web search company. The subsidiaries management will no longer be constrained by the fact that they're overseen by a company that is completely disconnected from their own technologies. It's a win/win.

As an added bonus, Alphabet will also now be free to close down some of the more poorly performing subsidiaries without putting Google's stock price at risk.

[onehandle]

3. The spam ads for penis pills makes money.

Nothing else they do, does.

We've seen this play before.

Starting this fall, the penis pill spam ad revenue will be dropping off of mobile considerably.

'Tis a shame.

[yurbud]

4. I thought this was going to be a satire

[onehandle]

5. Blackwater is now known as Xe is now known as Academi.

First saw the Google thing in my tech Twitter feed.

Totally thought someone was trolling us all.

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

8. A better name for them would be Motherfuckers Incorporated.

Fucking anarchists.

[SwankyXomb]

6. Anything to avoid paying taxes.

[TM99]

7. Sorry oh lover of all things Apple

Google is not going anywhere.

Given their successful expansion into other tech arenas, it makes sense to change the parent company name.

As usual nothing to see here out of the ordinary.