Most of the stories say the same thing: The move increases transparency at the company, which is something that investors want, and it’s encouraging that Google co-founders, billionaires Larry Page and Sergey Brin will run the newly named parent company. Like Berkshire Hathaway, Google is also increasingly an investment company, through arms like Google Capital and Google Ventures, and not just a product company. “Rather than one giant realm ruled by a single family, Google is dividing its empire into territories”, he writes, . Twenty percent time was a big deal: products such as Gmail, Google News and apparently the mighty AdSense are all its children. If you try using some other browser in India, the only page that will open on it will be the site from where you can download a Google Chrome.
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As an example, when Google acquired Nest, there was a lot of speculation of perhaps one day seeing ads on thermostats or possibly a more subtle tie-in to Google’s advertising and data-collection web.
Google chief executive Larry Page announced the change on Monday, saying he will hold the same title at Alphabet.
Google is arguing that the shift means Google itself can focus on its core business and revenues (i.e. all that money in advertising) while the more experimental businesses can break free of the Google brand and become their own thing. This means that traders will be able to buy Alphabet stock while selling short (that is, betting against) some asset or synthetic security that mimics the financial performance of Google, the difference between the performance of those two assets representing a bet on the performance of Alphabet’s non-Google ventures.
The reason for the restructuring, Mr. Page outlines in the company’s official blog post, is that Google has become more than just the search engine company it was when it started.
Why is Google (Alphabet) doing this?
Sanjay Jha, the 52-year-old CEO of chipmaker Globalfoundries, had previously run Motorola Mobility and had served for years as a senior executive of Qualcomm, it said. I used Google Business for a very short time before running quickly to Office 365.
Google+ social network, among others.
The reorganization comes amid concerns that Google’s dominance of the tech sector may have peaked as the landscape evolves. But that doesn’t solve Google’s problem that most of its success is pinned on either pre-public inventions or a few smart acquisitions of companies that were trailblazers anyway. Now Google only strives to keep up with its competitors, releasing half-baked tools we don’t need and investing in technologies none of us will care about for another decade. Buffett has eschewed technology businesses or pretty much any company with a business model or prospects that are hard to project. He diplomatically navigated the company’s politics and avoided making enemies, telling Bloomberg, “We [Rubin and I] had a good sense of friendship, though we weren’t particularly close, but we never had any major disagreements”.
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In other words, it’s an approach that can fund world-changing research – but only so long as the underlying business remains a cash cow.
