Google announced a surprise restructuring on Monday. It formed a holding company called Alphabet, which will pool together all the operations that made up the former Google, organised in a "cleaner and more accountable," manner.
Alphabet will be run by Larry Page, as the CEO, and Sergey Brin, as the President. The largest part of Alphabet will be a slimmed down Google, with Sundar Pichai as CEO. Pichai will run the new Google, which will now only be composed of core internet-centric services like Search, advertising, Maps, YouTube, Android, apps. So what's left to join 'Google' as a part of Alphabet? There's quite a lot of operations that will be separate parts of Alphabet including; Calico (biotech), Nest (smart homes), Fiber (ISP), Ventures and Capital (investments) and X-lab (moonshoot projects such as self-driving cars and delivery drones).
Alphabet CEO Larry Page wrote a blog post about the reorganisation, explaining the reasons behind the restructuring. Page said that it would be 'comfortable' not to reorganise and things were operating well "but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable." Going forward the "new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google," thought Page. Each distinct part of Alphabet will have a strong leader and independence.
The stock market has responded well to the changes, which make the structure of Alphabet similar to the likes of Berkshire Hathaway and General Electric, according to Reuters. In after-hours trading Google shares have been up as much as seven per cent. One of the things that will have cheered investors is the announcement of a 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". From Q4 it will be easy to see what parts of Alphabet "are bringing in the bacon and which ones are science projects and which ones are long-term bets," Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates explained to Reuters.
You can find the Alphabet home page at abc.xyz. If you inadvertently type in abc.wtf you will be redirected to Microsoft's Bing.
