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Alphabet Wraps Up Reorganization With a New Company Called XXVI (bloomberg.com)
Alphabet is approaching its final form. After evolving from Google into a corporate parent with distinct arms in far-flung fields like health care and self-driving cars, it is now forming a new holding company called XXVI Holdings Inc. Bloomberg reports: The new structure legally separates Google from other units such as Waymo, its self-driving car business, and Verily, a medical device and health data firm. Google co-founder Larry Page announced Alphabet two years ago to foster new businesses that operate independently from Google. Technically, however, those units, called the "Other Bets," were still subsidiaries of Google. The new structure, unveiled Friday, enables the Other Bets to become subsidiaries of Alphabet on the same legal footing as Google. "We're updating our corporate structure to implement the changes we announced with the creation of Alphabet in 2015," Gina Weakley Johnson, an Alphabet spokeswoman, said. She called the process a legal formality that won't affect ultimate shareholder control, operations, management or personnel at the 75,606 person company. Google is also changing from a corporation to a limited liability company, or LLC. This won't alter the way the business pays taxes, Johnson said. The switch is partly related to Google's transformation from a listed public company into a business owned by a holding company. Now, it's owned by Alphabet, so it effectively has only one investor and no public disclosure obligations. An LLC structure is better suited to this situation. XXVI, the name of the new holding entity, is the number of letters in the alphabet expressed in Roman numerals.
XXVI, the name of the new holding entity, is the number of letters in the alphabet expressed in Roman numerals.
Thanks for clarifying that. At first I thought they named themselves for Taylor Switft's age. The number of letters in the alphabet is much better. Of course, it is a good thing that Google wasn't started in China, or the new company would have ended up with a name like MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
When you have too much money and too many employees.
Meaningless wankery.
Nobody over 26 yrs old will be hired, just like the parent company?
So what is the purpose of this expenditure of presumably vast amounts of money to set up shell companies that legally separate individuals from activities while still allowing the individuals to exert full control? Is it just a tax shelter? Is it to limit legal liability when one of these firms does something hugely illegal? Corporate does not spend money without a reason.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"The Umbrella Corporation"
Like if the self driving car part gets a 100bn wrongful death lawsuit it won't take Google down with it.
I'm now certain that whoever comes up with names at that company has a side interest in numerology.
Technically, you're right of course. But this has more to do with how marketing is taught in US business schools.
The idea is that a company should hire a consulting company and pay them millions of dollars to check all the possible meanings of a name and its symbols in all the countries the company will want to operate in.
And please don't get me wrong, this isn't really bad advice in itself. Foreigners can be super arrogant in thinking that a name that sounds good to them will also sound equally good to everyone else in the world. It's just the example that is typically brought up with it that is slightly problematic.
The claim is that GM failed miserably in South America because it launched a car called "Nova", which means "No Go" in Spanish. However, that's not exactly what happened. Nova was initially very successful in the South American countries it launched in. It's just that the Nova car wasn't reliable and the name eventually became a joke because of its associated quality control issues. And yes, the name itself didn't really help, but the name itself wasn't the key lesson to take away from that example either.
In any case, coming back to your original comment. Yes, I'm sure someone versed in numerology checked out all the possible meanings and made sure most of those meanings were positive. And the same goes for local meaning, cultural meaning, historical meaning, color meaning, font meanings, etc. After all, correcting the mistake of an ill-chosen brand name and relaunching the brand can be super expensive. And this is not a risk marketing people want to take.
> When you have too much money and too many employees.
Yes, they had too many employees in too many completely different lines of business, all under one awkwardly large company.
> Meaningless wankery.
Now they are splitting different subsidiaries that do different things, like Waymo, into distinctly separate companies. Each company will have fewer employees, and be more focused. That's not meaningless.
Previously, Alphabet had a division that builds self-driving cars, called Waymo, another division that makes smart thermostats, another that makes Android, etc. Dozens of unrelated product lines. It's awkward and difficult to manage so many different projects as one company. What reason is there to keep them all together as divisions of the company? It just makes sense for these separate products, in different industries, so be separate companies. The new holding company allows them to be separate companies, managed separately. They can easily be sold off whenever it makes sense to do so. The holding company will own stock in each of the new seperate companies.
Naw, the "don't be evil" motto was a good thing.
It was kind of a bad sign when they tried to distance themselves from it back in 2012ish. But I didn't think they were abusing their power much and it was really just a clash of corporate vs engineering cultures.
But the switch from Google to Alphabet is the culmination of that corporate culture winning out. Google might still be run by engineers, but Alphabet is pulling the strings. Probably just for tax shenanigan schemes, but it's a pretty clear sign. I thought it wouldn't happen until Page and Brin kicked the bucket. "old guard" and all that, and Page is even back in the saddle as CEO. I dunno, I guess money changes people.
And why are we keen to harp on this? Because engineers (Or specifically Paul Buchheit) aren't typically high-functioning sociopaths like most CEOs. As companies get bigger their culture and overall policy shifts from the founding geeks who made it to the corporate bosses who run it. Of course that started with Eric Schmidt, but culture is real slow the change. Arguably it's the natural slide to the lowest energy state, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it
Don't be evil, is a good motto. The sort of thing that an upcoming disruptive new competition that has the public's attention would make. Getting rid of it, distancing themselves from it, is the sort of thing that a big established soulless corporation would do. And that goes hand in hand with being dicks t
Which is why I switched to duckduckgo and then ixquick for my searches around 2015. Google maps (and their traffic) is still handy, as is the gmail and calendar, but I'll switch away once I get off my butt or the google overlords start misbehaving. Same way I dropped facebook once that started going south.
And besides, if a company's motto is ever something as direct like that, of course you can expect people to harp on it whenever they do something that appears to run afoul of it. It's kinda why mottos exist.