Google creates #Alphabet – an historical day in technology and for the internet.
Google, the search engine founded in 1998, is undertaking a historic restructure that could change the way we view the company.
Today, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin give control of Google to Sundar Pichai and announced they were creating a new corporate parent called Alphabet.
Google will become a “newer Google (that) is a bit slimmed down,” Larry Page wrote Monday August 10, 2015 in a blog post.
Billionaire founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced a huge change to the way Google is structured on the official Google blog:
“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.
We now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android…
We are creating a new company, called Alphabet (http://abc.xyz).
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.”
#Alphabet will also include their huge innovative divisions like ‘Life Sciences‘ and ‘Calico,’ ‘Fibre’ and ‘Nest’
Life Sciences is devoted to creating devices that will help people with a variety of health problems while Calico aims to increase the lifespan of the average human.
Other Google investments will be spun off into #Alphabet include: X-Lab wich includes Wing – Google’s drone program and their self driving car program.
‘Ventures’, ‘Capital’ and many other smaller divisions will also be spun off.
Google main search, android, advertising, Youtube, apps and maps business will remain under the Google banner.
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.
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. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.
For Sergey and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google — the birth of Alphabet. 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–the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.
We are excited about…
Getting more ambitious things done.
Taking the long-term view.
Empowering great entrepreneurs and companies to flourish.
Investing at the scale of the opportunities and resources we see.
Improving the transparency and oversight of what we’re doing.
Making Google even better through greater focus.
And hopefully…as a result of all this, improving the lives of as many people as we can.
What could be better? No wonder we are excited to get to work with everyone in the Alphabet family. Don’t worry, we’re still getting used to the name too!
