Google has announced a major restructuring of the entire organization, starting with the creation of an all-new company called Alphabet, Inc., which will now serve as the parent company of Google and all of its previous projects.
The Google brand will be “slimmed down” and focus on web products like Search and Gmail, with SVP of Android/Chrome/Google Apps Sundar Pichai serving as CEO. Other endeavours like health research, will belong to other companies that will be broken out of Google.
Larry Page will serve as CEO of Alphabet, and Sergey Brin will function as president. The goal of breaking out these companies under Page and Brin is to allow each of them to focus more on their own areas independently.
What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related.
Other subsidiaries of Alphabet include Calico, the longevity project; Life Sciences, which is working on the smart contact lens; Nest, which works on home automation; and more. The SEC filing has provided an idea of which companies will be in charge of which products now.
YouTube has long functioned as its own company with its own CEO under Google with great success, so it seems like a logical step for the rest of the widely varying Google properties to take the same approach.
Google will no longer be a publicly-traded entity and will be replaced by Alphabet. Google shares will automatically be converted to Alphabet shares with no changes. Not even the $GOOG and $GOOGL stock symbols will change.
There are still many other questions about what this change means for a lot of Google’s existing products, but it’s certain we’ll see answers soon as the new structure goes into effect.
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