“Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things”, explained Alphabet CEO Larry Page. Each of these businesses will have its own CEO and business strategy. Google will continue to operate as it now does and most of Google’s apps and services such as Search, Android, YouTube, Chrome and Maps will remain under its control.
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To prove a trademark infringement, a trademark owner would have to show that the new Alphabet created a “likelihood of confusion” among consumers between the two brands.
Page adds he wants each Alphabet company to develop their own brands and have more independence.
“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”, wrote Page.
The Alphabet companies will retain their current leadership.
Google X, which handles research on self-driving cars and Internet balloons, will also be a separate unit. The company will retain its GOOG and GOOGL tickers, with each class of shares automatically converting into an equal number of Alphabet shares.
All of the formal details regarding the transition from Google to Alphabet have been released in the company’s SEC filing.
As part of the change, longtime Google CEO Larry Page said he would hand over the reins of the company’s mainstay search-engine division to the company’s product chief, Sundar Pichai.
Jenna Pitcher is a freelance journalist writing for IGN.
The move will also likely provide a bit more transparency over the financial performance of individual businesses within Alphabet, rather than just lumping it all in with Google, and Alphabet’s experimentation could get more funding than it otherwise would have when included in with the core advertising business. Page is to become CEO of Alphabet.
There’s a new Google named Alphabet, but the old Google is still Google Google. With more than 11,000 employees in town and plans to hire many more in near future, Google plays a significant role in almost all aspects of city management.
The Google you once knew will no longer be Google, it’ll be Alphabet.
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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The announcement on Monday of the new corporate structure was generally welcomed in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, where Google shares shot up some 3.6 percent in early trade on the news.
