Google Is Dead; Long Live Google

Google announced the creation of a new company called Alphabet, with Google founders Larry Page serving as CEO and Sergey Brin as president. Google co-founder Sergey Brin will become president of Alphabet, and Eric Schmidt will be executive chairman. Google will then become a subsidiary of this parent company and will be headed by a new CEO. Google will get a new CEO, Sundar Pichai, who has been at Google for a decade.

“Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related”, Page wrote in a blog today.

Other departments spinning off into their own sub-companies including research focused Life Sciences (Google contact lenses), the Google X lab (driverless cars, Google Glass, drone delivery), Calico (increasing longevity), and the company’s robotics division. Also, with a hyphen, alpha-bet means an investment return above benchmark, he said.

YouTube, the online video behemoth with more than a billion users and its own CEO, remains under Google as a core business. When you take a look at how Google has been organized (or perhaps a better word is disorganized) you’ll see a bunch of business ventures lumped together.

Under the changes, the main Google business will be slimmed down to include search search, ads, maps, apps, YouTube and Android. Technically, they still will, but they’ll have a level of detachment that should make their jobs (and their company) more manageable. A BMW spokeswoman said overnight that the automaker was not informed ahead of time of plans by Mr. Page and Mr. Brin to create a company called Alphabet and had not received any offers to buy the Internet domain or the trademark. And secondly, Google may very well be in violation of BMW’s trademark due to the fact that this only occurs if it causes confusion between the two companies. Google, in fact, was part of a deal $120 million funding deal for Editas Medicine to create technology capable of “editing” the human genome. Investors cheered the news, pushing the shares up 11 percent in German trading. Google’s corporate motto is famously “don’t be evil”, although that hasn’t stopped the company from getting into strife with the European Union, which has been trying to break up Google for years, over its market dominance, or being criticised by various countries (including Australia) for not paying much tax.

Alphabet will replace Google as the publicly traded entity.