Google Inc. is now Alphabet Inc.

[Ryuzaki]

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/google-alphabet.html

Larry Page and Sergey Brin have decided to become Alphabet, Inc., with their new website http://abc.xyz which will become the umbrella corporation for all of their various efforts, Google included.

They will now be publicly traded as Alphabet, Inc. but will keep their stock tickers GOOG and GOOGL.

This puts Google on the same level as Calico, Youtube, Blogger, and all of their other various businesses, all under one umbrella.

Pretty interesting to see such a giant make this kind of shift. What do you guys make of it? Any implications for us? Any "behind-the-scenes" reasons that the public isn't meant to see or understand?

 

[qwianghomingh]

They will probably put less emphasis on the google search engine as future technology might make it more ineffective and relevant.

Alphabet Inc might mean that they want to become a host of all technology from A to Z, making search a part of it, instead of being the centrum of attention.

I've read the same thing by g alerts, but not from the source but from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-changes-structure-forms-new-holding-company/ .

 

[NormCharlton]

This is actually awesome, imo. I know most here hate them - but I'm a huge Google fan and especially a fan of Brim and Page. Their size and power is truly scary, but honestly I feel like so far we've received the best possible outcome for a company this size and this ambitious. SEO practices aside, they actually take risks and invest in things that won't pay off for years or sometimes decades...something that most huge conglomerates usually avoid. They also invest in awesome life changing technologies that don't have an immediate road to monetization, which is commendable.

But they became bloated. Knowing quite a few people that work/have worked at Google, most of these teams were already pretty disjointed and operated independently for the most part.

Also I think that this probably means more big investments and acquisitions. We aren't that far away from some of these technologies (self driving car for instance) being commercially ready and viable. The self driving car would be a world-altering technology, it makes sense to give that kind of thing its independence outside of the web search company.

Also I might be wrong - but I think YouTube and other similar web properties that are currently a part of Google and related to search will stay under the Google company. Although YouTube itself is definitely big enough to be its own entity, a lot of the others are not. I think he just used Chrome, YouTube and Maps as examples of side-products their company released that started small and became giants on their own. I think this re-structuring will mostly apply to companies that are outside of the web search scope, like the health and energy examples he gave. It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to make every single web platform owned by Google its own separate entity, especially when a lot of those platforms are just services built to supplement Google Search.

Also this probably makes it easier for Google to sell off properties that underperform, since they will be independent and not all intertwined with other Google teams.

 

[turbin3]

Make no mistake, publicly-traded companies don't spend money like non-profits. For profit companies, though they may be playing the long game, do have a return in mind when they make an investment. It may be peripheral to what other people think is profitable. Google, by playing the long game, has ended up quite intentionally with a monopoly. Guess what Google Fiber is supposed to be? Further strengthening that monopoly by building large-scale infrastructure in the digital world. Expect to see them expanding their reach into various areas of telecom in the next 5yrs. With this restructuring, I would expect to see them expanding into various other types of "infrastructure" as well within the next 5-7yrs.

Too many things connected to any one "system" is never a good thing. 80's movies taught us that much. LOL I can't help but feel that there is a digital reckoning coming for Google at some point in the future. They will get too big for their own good at some point, and eventually someone will come along and take the rug out from under them. Maybe it will be a new technology that revolutionizes the industry, much like Google originally did. Who knows. Just like with Democracies, (of which America is NOT, it is supposed to be a Republic), usually there is an interval in which they build to an unsustainable level, destroy themselves and must be refreshed again.

When companies offer me "free" shit, I can't help but think of the increasingly socialized US government, and how that "free" shit is being paid for by the financial enslavement of our future children. In the case of Google, it could be stated more appropriately as the informational enslavement of our future children. I am a bit of a pessimist though. LOL

 

[Philip J. Fry]

What's the bigger shock? Google changing its name or a company buying a .xyz domain name?