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Google Is Restructuring Under a New Company Called Alphabet
Mark Wilson writes: Sundar Pichai is the new CEO of Google as the company undergoes a huge restructuring. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are moving to a new company called Google Alphabet which will serve as an umbrella company for Google and its various projects. Google itself is being, in Page's words, "slimmed down" and the change is quite an extraordinary one. Page quotes the original founders' letter that was written 11 years go. It states that "Google is not a conventional company", and today's announcement makes that perfectly clear. There's a lot to take in...Google Alphabet is, essentially, the new face of Google. Page chose to make the announcement in a blog post that went live after the stock markets closed. This is more than just a rebranding, it is a complete shakeup, the scale of which is almost unprecedented.
- So, there's this new Alphabet project-
- You mean Google project?
- Yeah. So anyway, this new project...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Google has been slowly changing from a dotcom tech company to a multinational conglomerate for a few years now. This is just them acknowledging that fact and structuring the company accordingly. This is similar to how United Aircraft became United Technologies in the 70s.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
No, that's pretty conventional nowadays.
It is a sad joke when it actually represents how formulaic business management has become
Blame predecessor and cronies
Build wall of well-paid sycophants
Receive bonus
Blame organization
Reorganize
Receive bonus
Blame employees
Outsource
Receive bonus
.
.
.
Rinse and Repeat at next company
Wherever You Go, There You Are
He's obviously trying to get what he thinks is important information modded up by placing it higher within the discussion.
This isn't an unreasonable thing to do. In fact, it's often quite necessary, given how Slashdot's mod system is pretty badly broken. It may not be completely broken, like reddit's, or Hacker News', or Stack Overflow's are, but it's still broken.
When you combine a limited number of mods, each with a limited number of mod points, and the propensity people have for not reading through all of the comments before using those mod points, the comments that appear highest within the discussion tend to get modded up the most.
Excellent comments that just happened to get posted later tend to be totally ignored, with comparatively shitty comments posted earlier getting the mod points first, just because they appear first when reading the comments from the top down.
So some people are inclined to work around this broken mod system by putting their comments up as early as possible within the discussion.
We can't blame them for doing that. What we should blame is the broken mod system that forces such behavior.
I love how, in the blog post, Larry specifically mentions four things that "seemed crazy at the time" that purportedly began at Google. Unfortunately two of them - YouTube and Google Maps - were actually created by others and eventually purchased by Google.
I can't wait for his future declarations regarding how people thought Google was crazy when they first created Waze!
#DeleteChrome
It probably also goes some distance to protecting Google's product development from any threats against its advertising business by cranking regulators.
And courts. This helps to segment Google's advertising business so that if they get slammed by a government for refusing to censor, it's much harder to go after the parent company's assets. It's risk-management for shareholders.