Google Reorganizes Into Alphabet: Sundar Pichai is CEO of Google
by Joshua Ho on August 10, 2015 5:25 PM EST- Posted in
Today, Google announced that they will undergo reorganization to better represent the growth that the company has seen in the past few years. As a result, Google the company will be now branded as Alphabet.
The big news here is that Google the internet services company will become one subsidiary of the larger Alphabet company - and said subsidiary still operating under the name Google - with the goal of better seperating Google's core business from what are now Alphabet's more experimental, far flung ventures. Consequently this change will see current parts of Google like X labs, Calico, Life Sciences, and other ventures shifted over to Alphabet. Meanwhile web services and software like Android, Maps, and Gmail will remain under the Google brand.
Organizationally, Larry Page will remain CEO of this reorganized company, and Sergey Brin will be President. Sundar Pichai will also be CEO of the new Google. Google stock is also immediately being converted over to Alphabet stock, and going forward Alphabet will be the reporting company, however Google-the-subsidiary results will be broken down and reported as part of Alphabet's results.
Ultimately it remains to be seen what effects this will have on the Google that we’ve known for the past few years. However given that the management structure has remained relatively constant in this move I suspect that business will continue on as usual.
Source: Google Official Blog
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
34 Comments
View All Comments
at80eighty - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
its not like they can stop anyone anyway. there are companies already registered with the namecjb110 - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
This is almost pure investor related, you're not going to see anything by Alphabet. It does allow investors to see how the parts are performing though, e.g. is Nest working or is it just swallowing money. At the moment you can't, without too much digging. So similar to Microsoft result announcements, next time Alphabet announce results you can see which areas are supporting the others, and which are now doing well or bad.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
The move makes a lot of sense except for the added potential burden of more overhead as each smaller subsidiary builds its own management stack and kingdom. The move also might result in the creation of artificial organizational barriers that inhibit communication in products that might require capabilities that leverage existing or new products being developed by other subsidiaries. Each smaller organization might end up working in a vacuum rather than participating in the bigger entity. Management will have their wok cut out for them in the form of overcoming those new limitations that largely will grow from human organizational psychology. Given that possibility, there has to be justification that makes the added costs return investment value worthy of the effort.It might be that this move is being done in order to create individual legal entities working on independent products that give the outside world (fearful governments and private citizens) a certain degree of false comfort regarding the intrusiveness of each new product. If we don't see Subsidiary X's new product as much of a threat individually because our minds don't automatically associate it with other privacy-invading mechanisms that are now made by some other subsidiary, we'll be less likely to view the totality with Alphabet at its head as suspicious. Maybe this is somewhat motivated by a need to deflect litigation from the more wise folks in the Eurozone while making Americans (who already largely accept and submit to Google/Alphabet) a little more apathetic since Americans are unlikely to expend the energy to ponder a more complex corporate creature to at any depth. Therein could lurk the investment value the company is ultimately seeking and might be the motivation below the public announcement for the change. Since Google's PR is never to be taken without a healthy number of salt grains, I'd say looking deeper for the devil in the details is probably worth it. In any case, no matter what discussions happened around the conference tables in the Googleplex, we live in interesting "big data" times where a lot of other companies are just as guilty of trying to analyze and monetize the activities, location, texts, calls, and so forth of the end user. Unfortunately, these other companies like Microsoft that is attempting to rapidly catch up through Windows 10's collection tools or Facebook that's probably as close to Google as possible, but not as pervasively widespread through advertising services, are trailing their market-leading rival in this particular department. Arguably though, Microsoft is doing a better job at keeping data mining out of the limelight (perhaps unintentionally) because much of the classic Microsoft debate still centers around superficial OS UI changes that average people have become accustomed to arguing and fretting about instead.
TennesseeTony - Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - link
Yeah, but, Alphabet?