August 10th – Google announce a complete restructure and are to become a subsidiary of ‘Alphabet’, their new parent company.
This applies to a majority of the businesses owned and run by Google. This came in tangent with Sundar Pichai being named their new CEO; Larry Page will now serve as the CEO of Alphabet, with Sergey Brin as their President.
Google thought they had become too diverse – this, coupled with the struggle of the business flourishing individually. Splitting the subsidiary companies up and grouping them under a parent company makes sense in this vein.
Chrome, Youtube, Android and a number of Google’s other businesses will remain under Google’s wing, whereas some of their newer entities such as Nest and Calico will be run under Alphabet.
When prompted to speak about the change, Larry Page said:
“As Sergey [Brin, co-founder] and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, ‘Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one’.
As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make ‘smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses’. From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.”
Why ‘Alphabet’? The reasoning is two-fold. First, because it is a representation of language, “the core of how we index with Google search” and second , because Alpha-bet means “investment return above benchmark, which we strive to do”. How very Google – unconventional, but clever – Even their URL is analogous with this: https://abc.xyz/
Alphabet’s companies will include Google Inc., Calico, Google Ventures, Nest, Google X, Fiber, and Google Capital.. for now.
What does this mean?
For most of us, very little for the foreseeable future. Google’s functionality will stay the same, Maps, Gmail, Youtube will continue to run as if nothing has changed.
In saying that, in light of the restructure, you can expect these areas to be run with more diligence so seeing improvements is plausible. The same can be said for the projects being run directly under Alphabet.
Also, there are many exciting project to be run under Alphabet, some potentially life changing. For instance, contact lenses that measure blood glucose levels, synthetic skin than can detect early stages of cancer. Oh, and Google Glass.
Anything else I tell you would be pure speculation but I expect it to be extremely interesting to see how Alphabet does affect us, and how it does aid in forming the newly slim-lined Google.
I do believe that giving absolute focus to these companies could result in a huge transformation, but only time will tell.
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