Slashdot Mirror
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.
may have been getting a little impatient with the many directions that Google was going in.
This allows Google to focus on making money from advertisements, while Alphabet can makes bets on many different products
At least that is my take on it
Wherever You Go, There You Are
A fellow had just been hired as the new CEO of a large high tech corporation. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three numbered envelopes. "Open these if you run up against a problem you don't think you can solve," he said.
Well, things went along pretty smoothly, but six months later, sales took a downturn and he was really catching a lot of heat. About at his wit's end, he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, "Blame your predecessor."
The new CEO called a press conference and tactfully laid the blame at the feet of the previous CEO. Satisfied with his comments, the press -- and Wall Street - responded positively, sales began to pick up and the problem was soon behind him.
About a year later, the company was again experiencing a slight dip in sales, combined with serious product problems. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, "Reorganize." This he did, and the company quickly rebounded.
After several consecutive profitable quarters, the company once again fell on difficult times. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope.
The message said, "Prepare three envelopes."
Makes a change from everything they do being just Beta.
Google employees should be in fear of losing their jobs. Corporate speak .....
First, the new parent company is just called "Alphabet" - not "Google Alphabet", as the summary claims.
Second, on the face of it this seems more like a rebranding than anything else. Nothing seems to be changing; they're just renaming "Google" to "Alphabet", and then repurposing the Google name to be used for one already-existing division within the renamed company. It doesn't sound like anything functional is really changing, which belies the idea this is a "massive reorganization".
#DeleteChrome
No. Google and Alphabet won't have separate stock. Google will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Like, you can't buy Chevrolet stock, you can only buy GM stock.
Existing Google shares will simply be converted to Alphabet shares.
Google is not a conventional company. It'll rob you in ways you've never imagine before, and will continue to rob you as it morph itself in ways you cannot even begin to imagine.
- So, there's this new Alphabet project-
- You mean Google project?
- Yeah. So anyway, this new project...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Don't be silly, you can't put the good bits in bag and all the shite in another.
Unless you're a bank.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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".
If they want to revert the same, then this guy is the needful.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The letter from Page could not be more clear. The new company name is Alphabet. Google is a wholly owned subsidiary of the new company along with YouTube, and other companies that will be created with their own CEOs.
GOOGL and GOOG stocks will continue to trade under those symbols, although the shares will actually be in the new Alphabet.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Not so sure about that, it could become like Berkshire Hathaway where a single company controls multiple companies, each with their own publicly traded stock
Except that it couldn't be clearer:
"Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet."
From the blog post
Which is exactly what Spy Handler said.
The article where I first read this news said the same thing:
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
All shares of Google will automatically convert into corresponding shares of Alphabet, which will continue to trade under the stock ticker symbols GOOG and GOOGL. Shares in Google soared 5% in after hours trading. The new structure is said to be similar to Warren Buffettâ(TM)s Berkshire Hathaway, which wholly owns a number of diverse holdings and has stakes in several others.
Apparently, someone already owns the rights to "Evil Corp".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Actually it would not surprise me if this were being done for legal protection. Google has diversified in so many different areas since its original creation, and many of these different areas have had their fair share of legal difficulties. Presently any legal attack on one of these areas is an attack on Google as a whole. By splitting the company into a bunch of separate legal entities, albeit under the same corporate umbrella, legal risk to the whole is mitigated.
For instance, Google/Alphabet can roll their European presence into Google.eu and be fully compliant with European data retention, right to be forgotten laws and tax laws, while Google.com could be solely US based and outside of EU jurisdiction.
Also, this is really not new. Corporates have been playing this shell game for years, hiding various aspects in companies who's only phyical esixtance is a single shared mailbox in some non-descript office building (many of them in places like Bermuda, Cayman Islands and Ireland). The difference here is Google/Alphabet are being open about splitting their company.
Alphabet comes before Apple in a list sorted alphabetically.
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.
...about the new Google alphabet! A is for Analytics, B is for Beta, C is for Chrome, D is for Doubleclick, ...
Come to think of it, this might outdo the educational initiatives from Microsoft and Bill Gates combined. Well played, Goog--Alphab--whatever.
NO CARRIER
The rumor on the Google blog is that Twitter was looking to offer Sundar Pichai a CEO position, so this move was made to keep him.
Perhaps there are some additional legal protections gained by doing this reorg as well.
-- Everything is wonderful until you know something about it.
"Bayerische Motoren Werke AG" is the official name of BMW, you know, of the cars and the bikes. I don't think a single person gets richer if Alphabet buys it ;)
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Previously, Google would not have been able to sell a new stock of "just" (Internet Search Only) Google, or for any of their individual projects, it was all one thing.
Actually, that is categorically not true. A company can create a "tracking" stock for a subsidiary or even a business function (like search), as long as it was willing to break out the reporting of that function.
The problem is that tracking stocks are not generally favored anymore by the street and probably wouldn't really work anyhow with the current Google structure (where Larry and Sergey have super-voting rights) as such a tracking stock would suffer the same albatross as GOOGL vs GOOG.
The value of what they have done is simply to provide more transparency about their businesses to the street and provide more deck chairs for potential C-level googlers that might want to defect. That's actually good value, but has nothing to do with being able to issue a stock for part of their business.