Google To Become A Part of Alphabet, A New Company
Google’s Larry Page has posted a blog post today on the company’s website that is going to come as a bit of a shock for some. Google is about to become a part of an all new start up of Larry and Sergey Brin. The company, Alphabet, will become the parent company of Google along with many of the other projects that will become companies in their own right. It’s a big and ambitious move.
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. 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.
The changes coming to Google are not insignificant and they will likely impact many of the services we use today.