According to Page, Alphabet will be a collection of companies, one of which will still be named Google, albeit a more “slimmed down” version. He said Alphabet is “mostly a collection of companies”, the largest of which is Google.
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Google has always been a search engine and advertising business at its core but over the years it’s grown into a company with diverse interests ranging from self-driving cars to home automation systems.
Under the new structure, Mr. Page is to run Alphabet along with Sergey Brin, who co-founded the web search business with him in 1998.
The Silicon Valley heavyweight is changing its operating structure by creating a new holding company called Alphabet.
Google’s senior vice president of products, Sundar Pichai, will take on the role of Google CEO.
He added, “Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable”.
Brin also cited the “amazing progress” being made by new services such as Google Photos and Google Now, which compiles information such as weather and directions tailored to individual consumers’ needs.
Wait! What? Why would BMW have anything to do with Google creating Alphabet? Alphabet will own Google plus a variety of other companies. That will include divisions like Life Sciences and Calico, which tend to focus on moonshot goals such as developing glucose-sensitive contact lenses or extending the human lifespan.
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We are not planning to sell the domain”,
said Micaela Sandstede, a BMW spokesperson in Munich who described the website as a “very active” part of Alphabet’s business. Google’s health-focused projects, X lab, and Investment and Capital arms will be separate from Google, now under the Alphabet umbrella.
If it did, then it might have to contend with legal fallout for potentially trampling on the trademark rights of what is a fairly common brand among dozens of businesses, including the BMW-owned vehicle leasing company.
Alphabet will replace Google as the publicly-traded entity and all shares will be transferred automatically.
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Perhaps it was inevitable given the myriad business interests and technology fields Google has been so eager to get its hands on. Both Page and Brin will be exclusively responsible for determining the compensation of the CEOs in each spin-off company and they’ve introduced segment reporting for Google’s Q4 results, where the internet company’s financials will be provided separately from the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole.
