Eric Schmidt will be the executive chairman at Alphabet, and Sundar Pichai is taking over as Google’s CEO.
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Being the new chief, Google’s advancements in machine learning will also be under Pichai’s leadership and bring the power of supercomputers into smartphones.
Google chief executive Larry Page announced the change, saying he would hold the same title at Alphabet, the new holding company for the tech giant’s newer ventures such as the research arm X Lab, investment unit Google Ventures and health and science operations. Google’s other co-founder, Sergey Brin, will be president of the new holding company.
Pichai also has a strong supporter in Google CEO Larry Page.
Bret Taylor, co-creator of Google Maps, ex-CTO of Facebook and Co-Founder of technology Quip also congratulated Pichai, the first non-white CEO, on Twitter. LinkedIn CEO also congratulated Sundar Pichai.
In a filing with federal regulator Securities and Exchange Commission, Google informed about its organizational restructuring.
“We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search”. Sundar is now the Senior Vice President of Products at Google and oversees product management, engineering, and research efforts for Google’s products and platforms. Page said this will allow him and Brin to get “more ambitious things done” and ‘take the long term view’.
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“.
For Page, the decision to shake up Google’s structure is driven by the desire to reinvigorate the company with an entrepreneurial culture and to give operating divisions more leeway to make their own decisions. “What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies”. As the profile said, “Page says Pichai ‘has deep technical expertise, a great product eye, and tremendous entrepreneurial flair. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed”, Page said in his blog post.
“It may not be quite ready yet”, Gillis said of YouTube. “And it is clear to us and our board that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google”, Page said.
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On an important note, Google Inc. will be replaced by Alphabet Inc and all shares will be automatically converted to Alphabet but will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG. “Recent launches like Google Photos and Google Now using machine learning are awesome progress”, he added.
