Ville Hellman, head of development at digital agency Rawnet, said: “Google has extended their operations to cover a lot of new fields for several years now, and some of the new fields it is entering are only very loosely related to their core business“.
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Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have set up a new company called Alphabet, which Google itself is now housed under. Google needs to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant. But the website for Alphabet, www.abc.xyz, is already blocked in China, which operates the world’s most extensive and sophisticated Internet censorship system, known as the “Great Firewall”.
With Alphabet as a holding company, the other businesses within Google will be split out as independent operating entities with their own CEOs, financial structures and independence.
These include companies such as Fiber, Life Sciences, the team working on the glucose-sensing contact lens, and longevity-focussed biotech company Calico.
Where Alphabet will resemble Berkshire is in three areas: bringing focus to each business by giving it its own separate leadership and corporate structure and funding, and allocating capital between businesses and projects. And secondly, Google may very well be in violation of BMW’s trademark due to the fact that this only occurs if it causes confusion between the two companies. CEO Larry Page says Alphabet means a “collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search!”
“Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I’ve been tremendously enjoying our work together”, Page said in a blog post. Each subsidiary will be independently managed, rendering the business structure “cleaner and more accountable”, he explained. Sundar Pichai, who had been senior vice president in charge of products, will be chief executive of Google, which will encompass Internet products like search, maps, YouTube and applications like Gmail. Google’s other co-founder, Sergey Brin, will be president of the new holding company. “He was rumored to be in play and had earned a CEO slot, yet there were none at Google to be had, and he supposedly was on the short list of folks who were in the final pool to be Microsoft’s CEO”. “We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes”.
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On March 13, 2013, Pichai added Android to the Google products he oversees.
