“This new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google“, explained Brin, in a blog post Monday.
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A key element in Google’s surprise restructuring that was announced yesterday is a newly-created parent company called Alphabet. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, on the other hand, will serve as president of Alphabet and Eric Schmidt will be chairman.
In addition to Google, Alphabet will oversee Google X, the company’s experimental research lab; Calico, the company’s effort to increase the human lifespan; and Life Sciences, which works on projects like smart contacts for diabetes patients.
“Investors will probably be happy because the new structure gives management more flexibility to manage the assets”, said Kay, noting that the revamp will also help Google become a leaner business.
Shareholders should not worry with the new company formation as it is reported the Google shares will be converted to Alphabet shares later this year and the same rights are to be retained by shareholders.
One of the firms named Alphabet, an outsourcing company in London, said that Google taking on its name was “quite flattering really”. Sundar Pichai, Google’s former product chief, has been appointed as CEO of Google. He also noted that alpha-bet means (Alpha is investment return above average) is what they are striving to accomplish. “I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products – the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands”. The Google unit will include the search engine, search ads, maps, apps, YouTube, Android and related technical operations, according to the filing.
Alphabet doesn’t spell “goodbye” for Google, even though numerous more exciting projects are no longer under its robotic umbrella.
When it comes to the appointment of Pichai as Google CEO, Mr. Page said, “I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations”. The company Alphabet is “a collection of companies”, with Google being one of them.
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2004: A few months after introducing Gmail, Google holds its first public stock offering. “We [have done] a lot of things that seemed insane at the time”, Page said, noting that the Alphabet strategy gives Google more flexibility to innovate. The creation of Alphabet is not likely to mean much for the average Google user.
