I would go one further, and say that&#x27;s the primary motivator. Preemptive restructuring.

I would hope the EU can see right through transparent moves like this, but I suspected this as well.

&quot;so this doesn&#x27;t ameliorate any of EU&#x27;s concerns&quot;The announcement seems deliberately vague. You&#x27;re right in that it doesn&#x27;t specifically address the EU concerns, but it creates a structure where that&#x27;s easier to do.

I think this is more about changing what Larry and Sergey do all day.This is in line with their prior strategery of continually maneuvering towards &quot;give us more authority but no responsibility.&quot;

Did I miss something in the announcement? When people say that Google is &quot;monolithic&quot;, they&#x27;re saying that Google contains Youtube (#1 video site), search (#1 search), Android (#1 mobile OS), maps (#1 map site), Gmail (#1 email site?), and G+ (Facebook competitor). These companies appear to remain inside the Google corporation after the &quot;restructuring&quot;, and so this doesn&#x27;t ameliorate any of EU&#x27;s concerns.I think this is more about changing what Larry and Sergey do all day.

I&#x27;m pretty sure Search and Maps will still be operating under the Google organization.  They&#x27;re just spinning off their more &quot;wacky&quot; projects that aren&#x27;t directly related to Internet technology.

Although what often happens is that now divisions compete against either in suboptimal ways. Search and Maps are separate? Great, until Search decides maps are really cool and starts building their own version, again. It takes a strong hand at the top to prevent division heads from viewing their peers as rivals.

Right, this is the real reason this is happening. Anticipating and staying 1 step ahead.

This is a big move, which might also possibly help with EU anti-trust accusations by splitting up the big-ol&#x27; monolithic GOOG into functionally separate units.

I love how they buried the &quot;Sundar Pichai is new Google CEO&quot; bit in there. In any case, this sounds promising and it&#x27;ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

The danger of conglomerates that give so much freedom to their subsidiaries is that said subsidiaries start actually competing against each other and hurting the business overall.

I&#x27;d assume it was a move to make failure easier.  Sclerosis is the natural fate of large corporations but variation and selection is an obvious way to help with that.

I think in this case it just means the new slimmed-down Google won&#x27;t include X, Calico, Wing, etc...

&gt; My question is, what does &quot;slimmed down&quot; Google mean?It looks like they&#x27;re taking all the experimental research stuff out of Google and making them direct subsidiaries of Alphabet instead, particularly projects that aren&#x27;t directly related to the Internet.The article talked about Life Sciences and Calico, and I have to wonder if other stuff like the self-driving cars are going to become direct Alphabet subsidiaries as well (then again, maybe not: I assume the self-driving cars are tied closely to Google Maps).

I think it just means the Google division will no longer contain the parts that have been spun off. There may be others but from the announcement that looks like: Life Sciences, Calico, Ventures and Capital, and X lab. Later on in the announcement they call Google &quot;slightly slimmed down&quot; which seems like a bit of an understatement.Presumably they hope that something outside of the new google division will blow up and make the divisions a bit less lopsided.

Less employees is how I interpret it. Lay-offs.I have no reason to suspect this, that&#x27;s just how I usually interpret wording like that.

&gt; My question is, what does &quot;slimmed down&quot; Google mean?It means Google minus all the parts that are now their own direct subsidiaries of Alphabet.Which, previously, were all part of Google. Hence, &quot;slimmed down&quot;.

I wonder where platforms (the HW company inside of Google that builds all their machines and switches) ends up. If they make it their own &#x27;letter&#x27; (H is for Hardware?) then they could potentially have it build data center hardware for other companies. That would be interesting.

Remember the &quot;more wood behind fewer arrows&quot;? That&#x27;s slim Google. Alphabet is Larry &amp; Sergey missing the more arrows.

&gt; what does &quot;slimmed down&quot; Google mean?Hopefully less likely to run afoul of antitrust regulation.

I didn&#x27;t read it that way. All of Google&#x27;s subsidiaries are subsidiaries of Alphabet, as is Google. But divisions inside of Google (Android, Youtube, &amp;c) remain Google.The big news is that Larry and Sergey are stepping back into a more Warren and Charlie kind of role, and Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Google.My question is, what does &quot;slimmed down&quot; Google mean?

Why do you think they are moving this way?It&#x27;s a twist on &quot;adult supervision&quot;. They have put an adult in charge of making money. Meanwhile, Larry and Sergey get to keep playing around with all sorts of exotic projects that may or may not eventually make money.

A very good point. Didn&#x27;t look like Sundar Pichai was going to oust Larry Page as CEO anytime soon. This gives everyone the ability to continue their upward mobility (and responsibility), with increased independence from aligned (but separate) businesses within Goog--er, Alphabet.IOW, Nest reports to Alphabet, and so does Google. Both are aligned, but separate.

My own guess: it allows upcoming management&#x2F;leadership to exercise more independence in the various divisions of &quot;Google&quot;. Further, People like titles, and it&#x27;s hard to share them.

Historically conglomerates are not known for speed and lean structures. I am curious how they plan to pull that off.

The intent is faster speed, greater independence and run like leaner startup. Also, additional career paths for employees, especially for the senior folks aspiring to be CEO.

If you compare GE to Google, or Samsung to Google, then Google doesn&#x27;t seem to have an absurdly diversified portfolio. But GE doesn&#x27;t have a back-end that can facilitate easily realizing marketplace advantages in jet engines based on what they&#x27;ve done in light bulbs. Google can do exactly this. And the EU has taken notice. It would make sense that this is the primary underlying issue, even if the move is primarily proactive.

But isnt this consolidation instead of separation? Or are they creating this entity so that they will keep Google intact even if they are ordered to separate?

Most certainly not the only reason why and possibly not even the most important, but the EU has started to load up on the anti monopoly against Google recently, with talks about breaking it up in Europe (similar to the Microsoft case in the US some years ago, although it didn&#x27;t go through and in this case it would only split in EU).<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2014&#x2F;nov&#x2F;27&#x2F;european-parliament-votes-yes-google-breakup-motion" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2014&#x2F;nov&#x2F;27&#x2F;european-p...</a>&gt; The European parliament has approved a motion calling for tougher regulation of internet search, including suggesting breaking up Google as a solution to its dominance in Europe.That certainly wasn&#x27;t a done deal nor even agreed that&#x27;s what the commission would really aim for, but the heat was mounting and Google&#x27;s move cut them short just in case.

I hope Eric Schmidt won&#x27;t manage Google Talk &#x2F; Hangouts anymore. Then there will be a chance of fixing this mess back.UPDATE:
Hm. Judging by downvotes, some folks here liked the fact that he killed XMPP federation of Google Talk and didn&#x27;t propose Hangouts as an alternative open protocol. What an achievement.

So all google divisions are now individual companies inside a conglomerated called Alphabet where Larry is the CEO and Sergei the President. Sundar Pichai is now the new CEO of Google. Is that right? Why do you think they are moving this way? Regulations? Taxes? What about Eric Schmidt?I don&#x27;t know much about trading, but look at that &quot;after hours&quot; spike! <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;postimg.org&#x2F;image&#x2F;ho5ecyr99&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;postimg.org&#x2F;image&#x2F;ho5ecyr99&#x2F;</a>EDIT: All google subsidiaries are now subsidiaries of a conglomerated called Alphabet. Google is a subsidiary too. Google stock will now be Alphabet stock.

According to the blog post the earnings reports will be separated by division.

Except it is the conglomerate that is going to trade on the market, not the individual business units.  They are changing their corporate structure to be more like GE or Lockheed.  All the units will still be summed together come earnings time.

I do not know much about big business financials, but this seems like a move that would allow Google to separate its experimental or research-based businesses that do not turn a profit from its giant bulging revenue beasts. It will likely allow Google to post better quarterlies, and push their stock up even higher.Appointing Sundar as CEO also allows them to focus more on the cool stuff in Alphabet and let Sundar run the meat and potatoes Google operations. Interesting moves.

It does make sense. Honestly, Sergey and larry have been complaining about this for a long time.But what makes this hard to believe is that they actually called it Alphabet, Inc. It has got to be april fools!

i&#x27;d say it makes perfect sense. google search becomes google, and the rest of the company (cars, cubesat internet, balloon internet, more down-to-earth ideas) belong somewhere else.

Look at the history of conglomerates like Mitsubishi, or Berkshire Hathaway. Alphabet is remarkable since it&#x27;s a very organized and name-concerned conglomeration, though.

I thought the GP was asking whether a conglomerate was formed in this bottom-up restructuring before. Many of the other conglomerates seemed to have become large through parent companies making or buying subsidiaries, not a subsidiary forming the parent.

Many large companies in other sectors are structured like this. Google, through its diverse acquisitions has now, in that sense, become like a lot of the older conglomerates like GE, Berkshire Hathaway, Raytheon, DuPont, Honeywell, UTC, 3M, etc. To different extents, these are all organized like Alphabet will be. Take branding: core products may be sold under the company&#x27;s name, other products may be sold in a nearly autonomous fashion. Similarly, quarterly earnings calls are centered on the performance of each of these sub-units.

Wow, this is really strange. Has there been any precedent for things like this?

Yeah, like PG is ever wrong! These people man... I swear.

They are not consumer-facing, so this would not matter.

Or their own facebook page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;alphabetINC" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;alphabetINC</a>

I actually tried registering that domain some months ago. It was taken. Dammit.

Paul Graham (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;</a>)

whoever owns alphabet.com is about to get some pretty sweet offers.

I&#x27;ll buy it from you for $20 if you want to get out while the market is tanking.

I just paid $250 dollars for a 4 letter domain today (igzi.com) after that post, and now that rule is broken? Today stinks.

Interesting. I suppose they&#x27;d fail PG&#x27;s test of owning your own .com.

This seems largely, at my admittedly brief viewing, to try to quell some of the structural concerns around all of these &quot;non-core&quot; businesses that the Artist Formerly Known as Google are participating in.I think it will streamline the management of all of these different businesses, at least make it clear where Larry and Sergey are focusing their efforts.

Wave, Plus, Glasses at least.If we are to include less ambitious stuff, Google Video, Orkut, Chromebooks (never went far), Reader, Google Code, Dart, nothing much came out of Morotola, etc.And let&#x27;s see were those &quot;self driving cars&quot; will go, market-wise...

Wave and Plus were not moonshotsIt would be a good thing explain why the downvotes

Search for &quot;The Google Graveyard&quot;. Someone made a thing about all the stuff Google killed off.

Things like the self-driving car don&#x27;t really fit the Google brand or corporate structure.

&gt; Does this mean that running high-risk project inside Google started to damage the reputation of Google?I don&#x27;t think it hurt the consumer reputation, and it can&#x27;t be about the investor reputation, since those things are still inside the entity (Alphabet) that investors will care about (at least, until a way to invest in the new &quot;core&quot; Google directly is offered, which may be part of the long-term plan -- it would explain why they indicated that they will report Google&#x27;s financials separately within Alphabet&#x27;s.)

I think you&#x27;re right. Google was devolving into a fragmented corporation with no direction or vision. Alphabet helps the Google brand by de-fragmenting it and turning it into the &quot;internet services&quot; arm and putting Google X, Life Sciences, etc etc into their own, protected, sandboxes.

Does this mean that running high-risk project inside Google started to damage the reputation of Google? Many (most) of the moonshot projects failed (which is normal), and I have the feeling that these events had a somewhat bad fallout on the image of the whole company (questioning its invicibility to some extent, mostly in the eyes of the press).

Something similar to Virgin I suppose. To keep other ventures from harming Google.

Doesn&#x27;t this completely change what you are buying when you buy GOOGL shares?It used to be you were investing in a search&#x2F;ad company that owned a lot of other stuff. Now you are investing in a company that owns the leading search&#x2F;ad company.The difference is obviously academic but I think it will make a difference in how the shares are traded. Perception drives the market after all.

Yes, but the issue is that Larry and Sergey see more value in user data than they do in &quot;viable business models.&quot; So privacy is still a huge concern with any subsidiary of Alphabet. Google just became a synonym for privacy issues because that was the parent company - now Alphabet is that parent company. No less evil, just new.

So Alphabet will start a new car company, and google can continue on as a search giant. It makes a lot of sense.So many people keep saying their biggest fear of google is that they will turn devices like Google Glass, or the Google car into products to collect information on people. When those products themselves are viable business models.

They are refactoring. Google is being updated to make some of its sub-classes into new top-level classes (sharing some characteristics with Google) and retain the rest as sub-classes. But to do this it must create a new parent class (for Google, and all of the other newly promoted classes) which is the new Alphabet class.Obviously s&#x2F;class&#x2F;company&#x2F;g modulo plurals...

Its probably simpler to think of it this way:* What was called &quot;Google&quot; will now be called &quot;Alphabet&quot;, with Larry and Sergey as CEO and President.* Much of the core business of the old Google will be operated in a division&#x2F;subsidiary of the new Alphabet called &quot;Google&quot;, of which Sundar Pichai will be CEO.* The rest of the old Google&#x27;s business will be in other units of Alphabet.

One more thing, Google will be named to Gisco.

To summarize (correct me if I&#x27;m wrong):- Google will now be operated as a subsidiary of a new company called Alphabet.- Alphabet will be publicly traded under the same symbols as Google is now traded.- Stock will just transfer as-is.- Sundar Pichai is now the CEO of Google.- Larry and Sergey will run Alphabet as CEO and President, respectively.

Congrats the founders of Google. Monumental move.I have very fond memories of early Google.com, and there always used to be a vivid spirit in their products that everything was so experimental and technically on the edge. That feeling has been gone for a very long time, but since Larry has come back it&#x27;s been slowly returning. Call me what you want, but I feel like this is such a smart move for the founders&#x27; freedom to explore.And the way they announced it is totally in line with the spirit. I&#x27;m sure there was a lot of technical work, and will be more, but they way it&#x27;s all hidden in the back so that they can focus on the most important parts. I&#x27;m a fan.

Are they really on the same playing field, though?

Seems like Alphabet (Google&#x2F;Page&#x2F;Brin) and Facebook (Zuckerberg) are in a race to become the Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet.

Yep, I misread it the second time through, sorry!

Re: edit 2: the stock holds all the stuff it held yesterday, right?  The stock is now for alphabet.

Google stock is converted to Alphabet stock. X moves from Google to Alphabet. No change in future value here.

Current sources of value != future sources of value.The price of Google&#x27;s stock is based on forward-looking prospects, not on current metrics.

Yes. Because the Google part isn&#x27;t being spun out to the shareholders but remaining a part of the conglomerate, this does nothing for the shareholders. The sea change would be if new-Google were a separate listed company returning its earnings to its shareholders. Instead it&#x27;s a separate private company returning its earnings to Larry and Sergei to blow on whatever BS they want... just like it was yesterday.About the only thing this changes is that ex-Google is now explicitly acknowledging to the public markets what everyone already knew: it&#x27;s a conglomerate, only unlike other conglomerates, it has only a single viable business.Yawn.

Isn&#x27;t 96% of Google profits from search ads only? They &#x27;ve done a million ventures since then, still remain ad-funded.

Berkshire is pretty explicit about using the firehose of cash that their insurance businesses throw off, as well as the huge amounts of premium float they have, as capital for their other more profitable businesses.

I&#x27;ve seen a lot of comparisons to Berkshire. Not every large conglomerate is Berkshire.Berkshire is composed of pre-existing businesses that were themselves successful before being purchased. They are not experimental ventures that need to be subsidized. It is exactly the opposite: money is plowed into the strongest businesses. They each generate excess cash, and it is easier to reinvest that cash in some places than others. The conglomerate structure makes it possible to put the cash where it gets the best returns without having to pay taxes or transaction fees.Alphabet has none of these properties, except the ability to allocate capital tax-free, but they already had that as Google.

What tax benefits this move might have is my question as well. It seems like if this were purely about internal organization they could have effectively reorganized Google in the same way without making Alphabet (although I&#x27;m not an executive so I could certainly be missing something here).

Is this purely a function of sharding liability across a conglomerate of businesses? It seems like concentrating Google&#x27;s ad revenue in a smaller, more efficient business unit is a nod to Berkshire Hathaway&#x27;s method of business.I can&#x27;t recall this sort of thing happening in my lifetime, so it will be really interesting to see how this plays out. I also wonder how this would be treated if Google didn&#x27;t have the crazy corporate structure they have now (where public shares are essentially non-equity and non-voting).<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economix.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-many-classes-of-google-stock&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economix.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-many-classe...</a>Edit: I am reasonably certain this is a tax and liability optimization strategy. It allows their more risky units to operate with separate liability from their cash cow.Edit 2: I&#x27;m actually surprised the stock value hasn&#x27;t tanked because most of the future potential of Google just got moved outside of the company. How much of Google&#x27;s future value was based on X? I would say a non-trivial amount of the stock price is the anticipation of future profits, which are now no longer a part of the company the stock is intended to index.Edit 3: Disregard Edit 2, I misread the release the second time through and assumed X was not part of the company :).

So much for &quot;you need that .com&quot;.

Looks like Alphabet.com whois was updated on August 3rd through a domain holding company. Maybe they do?

Crazy they picked a name where they don&#x27;t own the .com

isn&#x27;t amazon already doing the a-&gt;z thing

It&#x27;s an easter egg. It&#x27;s a pretty common thing Google does.

Alphabet is only missing a startup accelerator, why wouldn&#x27;t Sergey and Larry  now focus on earlier stage themselves? All  those ambitious things can be achieved better by a lot of startupa competing in parallel.

One thing I&#x27;ve heard is that this would help them in terms of taxes, allowing them to write off projects that don&#x27;t make money, although I&#x27;m not entirely clear on how Alphabet would accomplish this.That would be no joke if that was a reason to do it.

&gt;... any impact on the stock price.It&#x27;s up 5.88% (or $26bn) in after hours trading.

I wondered if the reorg would have any impact on the stock price. Given this joke, now I really wonder.Are we sure it isn&#x27;t April 1st? Are we sure this press release isn&#x27;t a hoax?This is so wild I&#x27;m having trouble believing any of it.

Is it any coincidence that Facebook released <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nuclide.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nuclide.io</a>?

Google can&#x27;t be Hooli! Facebook is already Hooli... just compare the Nucleus logo to the React logo...

Keep an eye on this:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;jobs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;jobs</a> -&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;about&#x2F;careers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;about&#x2F;careers&#x2F;</a>

Pardon my ignorance, but what&#x27;s hooly.xyz? Google&#x27;s innovation lab?

There&#x27;s an Easter Egg on the site where one of the periods is a link to <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hooli.xyz" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hooli.xyz</a> . So yeah it was a nod to that for sure.edit: The easter egg is on abc.xyz not the blogspot announcement.

It seems to me that their domain name (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;</a>), and maybe even the corporate name, was chosen to imitate Hooli XYZ.

Yaa, $1 for a domain like hooli.xyz or Google, I mean Alphabet ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz</a> ). I&#x27;ll try it out.Just snapped up prefi.xyz, suffi.xyz, picka.xyz, icebo.xyz, equino.xyz, mailbo.xyz, postbo.xyz, rolode.xyz, soapbo.xyz, toolbo.xyz, lunchbo.xyz, letterbo.xyz, chatterbo.xyz for about $15 total for all of them.I skipped on conve.xyz, laryn.xyz, proli.xyz, and surta.xyz, which were all open a few minutes ago.

Wouldn&#x27;t you have to pay the full price next year?

.xyz domains are selling at 90% discount, in case anyone is interested.

From the abc.xyz source code:Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort&lt;a href=&quot;<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hooli.xyz&#x2F;&quot;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hooli.xyz&#x2F;&quot;</a> target=&quot;_blank&quot; class=&quot;hidden-link&quot;&gt;.&lt;&#x2F;a&gt;

Nice catch, i am curious now if the silicon valley text written by knowing this?

All I can think of is &quot;Hooli XYZ - The moonshot factory&quot;.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hooli.xyz&#x2F;#inspiration" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hooli.xyz&#x2F;#inspiration</a>

Is $GOOG going the Berkshire Hathaway route? Conglomerate with a lot of non-related subsidiaries?

A directory of businesses, like a phone book for businesses instead of people[0].[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Yellow_pages" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Yellow_pages</a>

I thought it was meant to be reminiscent of yellow pages, or the phrase &quot;From A to Z&quot;. After all, Google is a directory service.

Probably was done to be ahead of apple and amazon in the yellow pages.

More of a loophole maybe than hiding. Like perhaps being one big company in the US, but somehow being &quot;separate&quot; companies that &quot;don&#x27;t collaborate&quot; in the EU?There&#x27;s other suggestions as to why, either to prevent experiments from tarnishing Google&#x27;s brand, or to ensure Google&#x27;s separate products can survive the eventual failure of the ad market.

What&#x27;s evil about it?The idea that they&#x27;re &quot;hiding&quot; from the EU crackdown is ridiculous. They know perfectly well it doesn&#x27;t work like that.

Will Google split off Android as a &quot;separate company&quot; under Alphabet to try to hide it from the EU&#x27;s crackdown?This is the most traditional-corporation definitely-evil move Google has ever made, whether their letter claims otherwise or not.

This is great. The best thing about Google was their willingness to try interesting things. But the Apple-ification of Google lead them to look like a company suffering from identity crisis, at least from the outside.This will keep Google products unified and work together, and will give them opportunity to throw mud at the wall with Alphabet.Also worth mentioning is that this kind of corporate restructuring is fairly common. Usually it is done by X company expanding into X Industries with X being a subsidiary of X Industries. It is just more visible because they went with a different name, reasons of which are in the post.

I had to look at my system clock a few times to make sure today isn&#x27;t the first of april.

And so Google becomes Berkshire Hathaway.

Something tells me the kind of visitors Alphabet hopes to attract to their new website will be sophisticated enough to find it, and if not, they would be gently nudged by Google search results.

If their intent is to continue to be a non-traditional company then it makes sense to NOT stick to a predictable&#x2F;conventional .COM domain. Specific to their chosen domain name, while I&#x27;m not crazy about this .XYZ domain extension, I give google...er...I mean, Alphabet awesomely big props for choosing a very different domain extension. Even though one might consider these guys Da Man, I feel choosing an alternative domain extension is a mild manner of &quot;sticking it to Da Man&quot;. Since so many decent combos for a .COM are taken, its like having all new real estate created from next-to-nothing. I for one greatly favor having an internet with myriad and varied domain extensions. Kudos to Alphabet&#x2F;Google for at least this seemingly small gesture!!

Am I the only one who came away wondering why they didn&#x27;t buy the domain alphabet.com?The company that owns it, ascio.com, isn&#x27;t even using it. Or perhaps they were a bit too greedy?

This is what I&#x27;m really wondering about, how much will things get split up?- Y for YouTube (easy)- C for Chrome (probably not)- ? for Gmail- ? for Analytics (or does that stick with AdSense?)

Those are conventional. “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.”

Not really. Alphabet.com is crashed and is down since the press release. So a lot of people are doing what PG suspected.

It may be the exception that proves the rule.

Congrats! It&#x27;s a new chapter for Google, an exciting beginning for Alphabet. It definitely broke PG&#x27;s theory on the .com

I wonder if, besides the obviously healthy restructuring, this is also to anticipate on future anti trust issues. It seems like they&#x27;re getting one step ahead like this.

And Nokia (the profitable company that remains after they sold the phone division albatross to Microsoft).

Quite a few of them around <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;in.finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;indian-ceos-leading-major-world-companies-1391495476-slideshow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;in.finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;indian-ceos-leading-majo...</a>

Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Pepsi, Nokia, Mastercard, Deutsche Bank

For anyone not familiar with Cisco&#x27;s market shares: one of Cisco&#x27;s most important markets is India.

It&#x27;s funny how Cisco&#x27;s CEO is not Indian.

Nope, still pretty surprising. China, Brazil, Russia are all humongous populations - dramatically fewer reps than India.

One seventh of the world&#x27;s population is Indian born, so perhaps not so surprising...

Just a stray observation, but now Microsoft and Google are both run by Indian born CEOs.

Sorry you&#x27;re being downvoted. I wasn&#x27;t sure who Susan was either and came to the comments for clarification.

&gt;&gt; Susan is doing a great job as CEO, running a strong brand and driving incredible growth.Is this supposed to say Sundar? Kind of an awkward mistake to make.

it shows up now.
The index just needs a bit time to update.

Inside my bubble, they&#x27;re 6th. Outside, 4th. Google is fast.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=abc.xyz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=abc.xyz</a>No Alphabet there.

When does this all roll under the sheinhardt wig company?

I&#x27;ve always wondered why we don&#x27;t see more of the studio model (like Pixar) in tech companies. Especially ones focused on innovation -- Thomas Edison didn&#x27;t just invent a single product, and that trend still influences how GE operates today.  It&#x27;s a bit of a stretch, but with some fuzziness around the boundaries, the idea of an over-arching studio seems to mostly describe YCombinator too.

The self-driving cars appear to be staying with Google for now.It would also have been nice to see Drive&#x2F;Docs&#x2F;Mail split off from Search&#x2F;Advertising, but that&#x27;s definitely a pie in the sky dream on my part ;)

Are there any prominent ventures (aside from YouTube) that aren&#x27;t being spun out?

I&#x27;m really confused why they wouldn&#x27;t chose to incorporate a &quot;new Google&quot;, and split out all its other ventures, future and existing, as subsidiaries, rather than make a new brand and relegate their previously mainone to subsidiary status, with its own sub-subsidiaries.Legal issues, I presume? Or are Brin and Page just having identity crises?I don&#x27;t think anyone will care if they see &quot;Foobar, an Alphabet company&quot; in the same way they would if it was Google, in any case.

Not sure if that&#x27;s good or bad for Alphabet International. Why would thousands of people (just a guess) hearing this news just assume that&#x27;s the new domain??

No reaction so far on their Facebook or blog. They do not appear to have a twitter account.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alphabet.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alphabet.com</a> is getting hammered right now.

I wonder where this puts the robot stuff that Google was doing? I assume it will be under Alphabet as well as Nest.

From his blog: &quot;Unless you&#x27;re so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you&#x27;re a marginal company.&quot;

Is Larry Page trolling PG? A day after PG publishes an essay that companies should own the .com version of their names, he renames Google to Alphabet with .xyz as the TLD.

They don&#x27;t even own alphabet.com. Not signaling strength (sarcasm).Also, feel bad for the owners of that domain as it is effectively being DDoS&#x27;ed.

&gt;&gt; small, separate entities makes it easier to tackle new opportunities (which start small) that wouldn&#x27;t move the needle for Google - as per Christensen.They would still need to move the needle for alphabet.

Well, they&#x27;re keeping combined the things that really can be a coherent product (the new &quot;Google&quot; subsidiary of Alphabet contains Search, YouTube, GMail, Android, etc.)I think this is just them realizing the limits of that Jobs advice - some things just don&#x27;t make sense together. Apple just showed that the optimal point was a lot farther in the integration direction than anyone else was willing to countenance.

20% time would be for nascent, university-like pre-startup projects. The conglomerate structure would give them somewhere to go, without needing to fit into search. But I admit, that&#x27;s quite a leap. An internal-YC would fill the gap, but there&#x27;s no evidence they&#x27;re doing that. So I think you&#x27;ve torpedoed my idea.

Won&#x27;t this make it more awkward to do something like 20% time? It sounds like the experimental stuff will be split out from the core &quot;Google&quot; business, and employees will work for either one or the other.

YouTube wasn&#x27;t considered crazy at all by the time Google bought it. It was clear by then that it was a runaway success, so clear that even traditional media companies like Viacom and News Corp were bidding for it. It certainly wasn&#x27;t some small company that Google grew from nothing into dominance; it was a billion-dollar company that had already won its space.Some articles from the time:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google_youtube&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google_youtube&#x2F;</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;google-has-acquired-youtube&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;google-has-acquired-youtube...</a>

Android was tiny and far away from launching when it was acquired. And the YouTube acquisition was definitely considered crazy at the time.

At last, reversing Jobs&#x27; advice to combine everything, returning to the original idea of trying lots of things. Maybe 20% time will see a resurgence, too? Bonus: small, separate entities makes it easier to tackle new opportunities (which start small) that wouldn&#x27;t move the needle for Google - as per Christensen.&gt; 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.Seems disingenuous, since YouTube and Android (at least) were acquisitions.

I&#x27;m cool with it. &quot;Google+ Photos&quot; and &quot;Google+ Hangouts&quot; being separated into &quot;Google Photos&quot; and &quot;Hangouts&quot; helps with clarity. So does splitting Google (Google X, Nest, Google research stuff, Google Ventures) up into purposeful, yet distinct, companies.

Those mercenary slaves were actually a big part of why the Ottomans did so well to start with. When they boys were taken they were given exams and the 10% that did the best became bureaucrats in a sort of version of the Chinese system. Exam based bureaucracy is a Big Deal when you&#x27;re competing with aristocracies.But eventually offices became hereditary and the normal sort of Chinese late dynastic rot set in.

You can&#x27;t really make this analogy work, because the Ottoman Empire&#x27;s basic problem was how to handle succession. It&#x27;s not that they went broke paying for pyramid maintenance.This parallel will be more apt if Alphabet board members start constantly strangling each other with silken cords, and the company develops a mercenary slave class that dominates decisions over who runs what division. Time will tell!

I could be remembering things incorrectly. It&#x27;s essentially geopolitical - they&#x27;re far from the Ottomon&#x27;s economic core, and don&#x27;t have free capital from navigable rivers through arable land (like the Danube gives the Balkans).I unfortunately don&#x27;t remember any sources for this, I just lifted the analogy.

What made egypt and the levant albatrosses? Source? I&#x27;d love to learn more.

One of the big dangers of being Google is using the profitable advertising arm to subsidize unprofitable side-ventures that don&#x27;t materially affect the advertising arm of the business. This same problem lead to the decline of the Ottoman Empire - they used the profitable Balkans to pick up albatrosses like Egypt and the Levant, and then collapsed when they lost the Balkans and could no longer subsidize ruling those areas.

on the one hand, cool, on the other, it just seems like Google has gone up it&#x27;s own arse.I mean, alphabet? really?

All of the announcement makes sense except the part where the Conglomerate is the one that is trading on the market.
Are the hived-off business separate in any sense if at earnings time everything sinks or swims together? the most logical move would be to trade the new GOOG

what i thought too <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.huffpost.com&#x2F;gen&#x2F;585370&#x2F;original.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.huffpost.com&#x2F;gen&#x2F;585370&#x2F;original.jpg</a>

I guess Alphabet is meant to be the PG of tech products?

&gt; spreads misery every place elsethis is actually why bean counters exist!

Sounds like a form of the ChargeBack system for IT.  It makes bean counters happy, but spreads misery every place else.

&gt; this builds much more explicit resentment from those that are profit-centers towards those that are cost-centersAn additional bit of trouble, coming from the way Google&#x27;s current profits are made, is that the profit centers are mainly perceived as less glamorous than the cost centers, which seems likely to only add to the resentment. It becomes much more explicit then, that the people doing the various bits of gruntwork needed to keep AdSense working (hugely profitable, but full of jobs like &quot;sales&quot; and &quot;click-fraud arms race&quot;) are funding the people getting on the news for drones (not profitable, but cool). Not impossible to manage, and I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ve thought about it, but does seem challenging.

&gt; And Sun customers should blame the planet model for one of the worst decisions in the history of a company that had plenty of contenders for the distinction: unbundling the compilers from the operating system and separately monetizing them.Hear, hear.The only thing Sun did that is the running for being even dumber is blowing Solaris x86. They released a pretty (for the time) awesome Solaris x86 product back in 1993, but never really got behind it. I had a Solaris 2.5.1 x86 workstation at work in 1997, and even then, my then-boss Scott Swanson was saying how Sun had blown it in terms of taking over the x86 server market.I mean, even into the year 2006, Red Hat was telling me if their kernel crashed on a RHEL box, I had to set things up so the core file would go out over the network, instead of somewhere on a local disk. Sun had solved problems like that long, long before.

Ha -- the Sun planets experience was the first thing that occurred to me as well. In my experience, the planets model was a total, unequivocal failure at Sun -- and the answer to the question of whether those companies could stand on their own was actually &quot;no&quot; for all of them (SME, SMCC and SunSoft all needed one another; the value came from what they delivered together). And Sun customers should blame the planet model for one of the worst decisions in the history of a company that had plenty of contenders for the distinction: unbundling the compilers from the operating system and separately monetizing them. But at least SunSoft, SMCC and SME came to realize that they had shared interests -- in stark contrast to JavaSoft which actually thought it was a separate company (never mind the unending welfare checks from SMI). Sun was a company prone to tribal warfare; as it turns out, dividing the company into tribal homelands did nothing for national unity.In terms of what&#x27;s happening here with Google&#x2F;Alphabet, I imagine that there is some desire to see if some of these companies can make it independently while still being able to make transfer payments to support those that can&#x27;t. The problem, of course, is that this builds much more explicit resentment from those that are profit-centers towards those that are cost-centers. It will be interesting to see how this works out, but hard to see how this is a stable state; it seems that shareholders will demand that businesses be spun out entirely -- or that the whole thing will have the fate of Google+ and be quietly folded up three years from now...

For some reason, people really do like to try the internal market approach. It&#x27;s not only on IT, companies do that with legal, accounting, any kind of creative sector (like marketing), engineering... I&#x27;m yet to see somebody try that with top management - might be a nice experiment.Internal markets are a really nice and well tested way to gather all the flexibility and agility of a corporate environment, while losing none of the risks, transaction costs and antagonism of a real market. It&#x27;s a sure way to move your company forward!But, rants apart, I read the article as Google creating something similar to Lucent Labs, not as separating bureaucratic divisions.

An alternative model is Samsung (and several other Korean chaebols), where upper management decided that the individual companies would be hurt by trying to act in the interests of other Samsung companies, and should act in the market on their own - e.g. how Samsung&#x27;s components (touchscreens, SoCs) are sold to Apple, their mobile division&#x27;s great competitor. This kind of heads-I-win, tails-you-lose strategy is enabled by the high level of autonomy lower-level groups have.

Agreed. And I hope that does happen. This is the best chance for Google to clear out the air around all the privacy and transparency issues it has been tackling. However I do wonder if that indeed is the plan.For example, Google would not want to miss on the data from its Fiber or Auto or Nest projects say. It is too valuable to not include as part of a user&#x27;s profile.If anything, I feel it can lead to just making the situation even more muddy. What happens to all the Terms and conditions? Privacy policies? Would they, or even can they, stay merged?

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s quite comparable though. This is chopping off companies with essentially no synergies with the core business, which are kept in a single monolithic entity. If anything the association is often negative, with the assumption that the only reason Google owns a business (e.g. Nest, Fiber) is to hoover up people&#x27;s private information.Now, there would be insane ways of splitting the company. Say putting building and operating data centers into a separate company from the company using the data centers to run services. Or splitting Android or Chrome into a separate company that&#x27;d then be funded by selling the default search engine setting to the highest bidder. If that kind of thing happens, it&#x27;d be women and children first into the lifeboats.

The recent release of kubernetes into the public domain seems to align with this. Add to that Google&#x27;s cloud services and you have infra that can be used by the independently spun off orgs.

For one thing, they&#x27;re specifically keeping Labs as part of Alphabet directly, rather than as a sub-company. That seems like recognition that experiments shouldn&#x27;t have to immediately pan out or immediately become self-sustaining.For another, they&#x27;ve said nothing about how they plan to handle IT and infrastructure. Though that&#x27;ll certainly be interesting; they&#x27;d be foolish not to take advantage of the Google datacenter and cloud services to accelerate new projects, for instance.

On the other hand, Semco is an example where this kind of thing worked really well. Their model of empowering employees, allowing innovation and splitting the company into a large number of micro-businesses had dramatic impact and turned the company around.Maybe the differences is that they did this to encourage diversification and innovation, not to manage it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;1989&#x2F;09&#x2F;managing-without-managers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;1989&#x2F;09&#x2F;managing-without-managers</a>

Technically, that&#x27;s the definition of &quot;the sum of its parts&quot;. The others are absolutely intended to have revenue and profits. Fiber already has revenue, and the potential upside on self-driving cars is astronomical. Non-G Alphabet is not a charity. It&#x27;s just not (yet) a cash cow.

Well, yes, but Sun was more than the sum of its parts.  Alphabet is actually less than the sum of its; Google is a highly profitable ad business that&#x27;s still showing nice growth.  The rest is a hodge-podge of startups and fantasies that provide neither revenue nor profit and have little chance of ever doing so.  Most of them don&#x27;t even have products.  There&#x27;s no reason to think that what is being taken out of Google was helping its business in any way, yet the market right now is willing to pay big option premiums on the remote chance of some future success.  So what is now Alphabet would be worth more if Google were spun out entirely to its existing shareholders, because they&#x27;d get whatever Google is plus whatever people are willing to pay for the imaginary stuff.  As a whole, it&#x27;s just Google less a lot of its profits.  None of this was true of Sun.

The alphabet is better than planets because you can always throw in more Unicode letters, while those damn astronomers took away a perfectly good planet!

I think you&#x27;re taking the concept behind the name a little too literally...They&#x27;re not going to collect one company per letter just so they can have an &quot;alphabet&quot; of 26 companies. The name just implies that they have a collection, a variety, a spectrum of companies.

Does it matter if it&#x27;s letters or planets?  What worked for one might not for the other and vice versa.

At least they didn&#x27;t call themselves Googlesoft or Gapple, in an attempt to define themselves in terms of their current rival-of-the-decade like Sun did.

Wow, they are doing letters? Really? Letters? Hey is Eric Schmidt still in the building somewhere? Ask him how well Planets worked out for Sun Microsystems.Interesting strategy, hard to second guess from the outside of course. Sun&#x27;s motivation was to figure out whether the other parts of the company could stand on their own[1], it also makes it less fiscally complicated to discharge an entire group into the void. Think HP selling off the Agilent half of itself.Generally though this sort of move is a way of containing and then &quot;fixing&quot; cost problems. Divestiture is so much easier once you&#x27;ve created the framework of a whole organization around each chunk. It can also be weirdly inefficient, at Sun each of the &quot;planets&quot; paid in a sum of money to IT (Bill Raduchel&#x27;s organization) for &quot;Corporate IT support&quot; except that Corporate IT didn&#x27;t work for them, they were just the only vendor you could use to get your IT services, so what you ended up with was really crappy IT work that you couldn&#x27;t shop around for. It was maddening. But the &#x27;collection of companies&#x27; design pattern requires either that you have your &quot;service providers&quot; that everyone uses (HR, IT, Legal) which gives little incentive for quality service, or everyone gets their own version which means a lot of excess overhead and duplicated work.I could think of at least two other ways Google could have re-organized without bringing that pain upon them, and as Eric lived through it at Sun as well I&#x27;m sure he has an opinion.Oh, and having one of the sub-companies get the world&#x27;s #3 brand? I wonder how that works out.[1] Answer &quot;No&quot; for SunSoft, &quot;Yes&quot; for Sun Hardware, &quot;No&quot; for Sun Labs.

&quot;C is for cookie, that&#x27;s good enough for me.&quot;

Makes sense. Hopefully this can stabilise the Google brand as something more reliable (fewer products that are launched one day, taken down the next), while still allowing them to experiment. The name is genius too; it suggests that there will be other companies equal to Google&#x27;s stature one day (&quot;G is for Google, H is for ...another billion dollar company?&quot;).

Yes! Both FB and now G are organized this way. Warren Buffet is really something else.

It&#x27;s almost as if they read &quot;the outsiders&quot;[0][0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;The-Outsiders-Unconventional-Radically-Blueprint&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1422162672" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;The-Outsiders-Unconventional-Radically...</a>

When the letters for the new companies run out, will they form kan.ji? ;-)

Perhaps this partly pre-empts threats to split up Google&#x27;s search from &#x27;other businesses&#x27;, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;20&#x2F;eu-competition-commissioner-i-have-no-grudge-against-google&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;20&#x2F;eu-competition-commissioner-i-...</a>

is this just an admission that they&#x27;re trying to monopolize every industry in the world?

Larry and Sergey never had anything to do with Google Ventures. It was intentionally kept separate and managed by Bill Maris. It operates on a $100m+ a year fund.Alphabet, Inc will be operated by the two Google Guys with billions in funding.&gt; We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. We&#x27;ll also make sure we have a great CEO for each business, and we’ll determine their compensation.They&#x27;re venture capitalists in all but name.

cough gv.com coughThis is not venture capital.

On the Internet, nobody knows that your dog doesn&#x27;t drink coffee.

Hahaha, you&#x27;re welcome a lot of other people&#x27;s comments tanked cause they mentioned that... I wonder why... ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

How can I upvote this to heaven? Made my day :-)I could write that I spilled my coffee, except I don&#x27;t drink coffee.

It&#x27;s not an aged domain, so it&#x27;ll tank in the SERPs. I can offer $50 for it. Payment via Paypal ;)

I wonder how it&#x27;ll affect their SERP ranking

&quot;Unless you&#x27;re so big that your reputation precedes you.&quot;

They gonna fail cause they don&#x27;t own the .com ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

Google will do no evil - we know, because we&#x27;ve been told so long (tax trickeries excluded). But what will Alphabet be allowed to do?

I am sure this has nothing to do with the plans the EU has with regulations. Nothing.

I was thinking the same thing; the difference is that Buffet &amp; Munger bought existing companies that were already financially strong&#x2F;had proven business models, and tried to leave their existing management (with a proven track record in that industry) in place.This seems more like Sergey &amp; Brin going to play in non-Google industries with unproven business models that they are experimenting in. (I&#x27;m likely being very naive &amp; unfair; obviously they&#x27;re very smart and wouldn&#x27;t do this on a whim.)Either way, Alphabet definitely sounds fun. It will be interesting to see how it works out.

This sounds a lot like Berkshire Hathaway&#x27;s structure.  Buffet + Munger at the top, mostly as advisers and fund managers, with individual companies given autonomy.  I like it but it all depends on whether Larry &amp; Sergey can hire well.

You would be way late on that. Even he dropped Snoop Lion.

The day I call Google &quot;Alphabet&quot; is the day I refer to the rapper as &quot;Snoop Lion.&quot;