Google Restructures Under New Parent Company Alphabet

IIT-Kharagpur on Tuesday morning opened a Facebook page to congratulate its 1989-batch student Sundar Pichai, who was on Monday elevated to the post of the CEO at Google.

Google as we know it now ceases to exist. The company named Larry Page as CEO over Alphabet, Sergey Brin as president and Eric Schmidt as executive chairman.

Other innovative employee offerings that were initially dismissed by traditional industries, such as Google’s sleep pods, have since been adopted by corporations such as GlaxoSmithKline. For its new Alphabet holding company, Google is using the domain name abc.xyz instead.

According to Page, it boils down to a question of focus and clarity.

Chrome, Gmail, Maps, and Android all connect to a numberless horde of software through their APIs, making them the center of an ecosystem of online data. One reason Page may value him so much is that Pichai has served as Page’s interpreter and facilitator. The subheading for the Buzzfeed piece summarises this angle: “Alphabet is a business move, but its true power is rhetorical: Add another company name, and you can preserve the Google name by untethering it from its broader, creepier efforts”. But Page disagrees that Google + is on the outs.

“Its been overwhelming to see such generous and warm responses from many dear friends, colleagues and strangers – heartfelt thanks”, Pichai, 43, tweeted yesterday.

But it may not signal much change in the current management structure, since Pichai has already been overseeing many of Google’s core operations, Gillis said. Or Bucket? Page wrote that “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!”

While Google’s CEOs say the new entity will never be a “consumer-driven business”, it’s quite likely that subsidiaries like Android or YouTube could turn out that way.

The 43-year-old also follows a well trodden path of Indians – including Microsoft boss Satya Nadella and Nokia head Rajeev Suri – who have trained at the prestigious engineering institutes, where competition for limited places is fierce.

Xinhua, China’s official news website, does not contain any news related to Google.

Aside from Google and YouTube, Alphabet’s other businesses are largely investments (read: they lose money). BMW could take the matter to court, although the company says there are now no plans to take legal action against google.

Pichai’s exit will be a big blow.

Chrome OS was conceived as a OS for low-cost computers and that are tethered to the internet, something Pichai believes to be the future of computing in emerging markets. From a search engine made up of millions of databases spread out across the globe, it has now ventured into developing self-driving cars, bringing free internet to less accessible areas and research on expanding life spans. To want to buy Alphabet, and clearly many do, you have got to be willing to give up a lot of customary protection in exchange for access to their world-changing genius.