Larry Page Blogs On Why Google Needed 'Alphabet' And Not The Other Way Around!
As Google embarks on a new journey its restructuring has given birth to a new publicly traded parent company called Alphabet Inc to house all of its disparate businesses. With the new India-born CEO of Google Sundar Pichai the company wishes to achieve new heights. Page writes in his blog Heres all you need to know about Alphabet.
As Google embarks on a new journey, its restructuring has given birth to a new publicly traded parent company called Alphabet Inc. to house all of its disparate businesses.
With the new India-born CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, the company wishes to achieve new heights. Google Inc. which will be replaced by Alphabet Inc., will remain the largest part of of the parent company. Alphabet, which is 'mostly a collection of companies', has been setup to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities inside of Google. Predictably enough, one of the provocations of creating an umbrella company is to distance the core business from risky businesses like X Labs etc.
"Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort. We are also stoked about growing our investment arms, Ventures and Capital, as part of this new structure." Page writes in his blog.
Here's all you need to know about Alphabet
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.
Reuters
Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. We'll also make sure we have a great CEO for each business, and we¡¯ll determine their compensation. In addition, with this new structure we plan to implement segment reporting for our Q4 results, where Google financials will be provided separately than those for the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole.
Why the name 'Alphabet'
googlewatchblog.de
We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity's most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha?bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for! I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products¡ªthe whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands."
How Google began
"As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, ¡°Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.¡± As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make ¡°smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.¡± From the start, we¡¯ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.
AFP
We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven¡¯t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about. We¡¯ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.
Why is Sundar Pichai the right choice
Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company. And it is clear to us and our board that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google. 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. I have been spending quite a bit of time with Sundar, helping him and the company in any way I can, and I will of course continue to do that.
AP
Google itself is also making all sorts of new products, and I know Sundar will always be focused on innovation¡ªcontinuing to stretch boundaries. I know he deeply cares that we can continue to make big strides on our core mission to organize the world's information. Recent launches like Google Photos and Google Now using machine learning are amazing progress. Google also has some services that are run with their own identity, like YouTube. Susan is doing a great job as CEO, running a strong brand and driving incredible growth.
