Google’s new Alphabet: All you need to know

Sunder Pichai becomes the new CEO of Google, the service, or rather the services.

With the reorganization, Page signaled that he wants to give more authority to CEOs of the companies that will be part of the new entity known as Alphabet.

Page has become chief executive of Alphabet, while fellow co-founder Sergey Brin is now President. Google Inc. for all intents and purposes is Google’s “core business” – search, YouTube, advertising, commerce, etc. Pichai will be running – and continuing to grow – this business. Buffett is CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate that owns more than 80 subsidiary companies and lets each operate with substantial independence.

“Think about the name Google, which came from a play upon the word “googol, ‘ which is the mathematical number that is infinitely large”.

A decision of this magnitude is expected to send shockwaves throughout the market and the news already had a positive impact on Google shares. The company can now focus on individual business units, which could maximize their performance. He’s been good for Google, and perhaps more than that, he’s seamlessly eased into a CEO-like role, melding humility, articulation, wisdom and confidence into a persona investors feel like they know and can trust. Google joins a long line of companies that have created quirky, confusing and sometimes hard-to-pronounce company names.

But the name Alphabet itself is simple and fits with Google’s reputation as being “user friendly and elementary”, says Tom Sepanski, naming and verbal identity director of branding firm Landor. This will separate its core businesses from the new and emerging opportunities. Other companies will focus on more experimental and fledgling endeavors such as self-driving cars, medical devices, life science research, and more.

Chennai born, IIT Kharagpur-educated Sundar Pichai has become the head of a “slightly slimmed down Google”, with the search giant in a major corporate restructuring forming an umbrella company called Alphabet. The two haven’t exactly endeared themselves to Wall Street with the way they’ve semi-haphazardly thrown money at anything that seemed cool-remember Google Glass?-without much regard for its business prospects.

The plan creates a new holding company, Alphabet, to run all the Google companies.

Fleshing out what Alphabet’s corporate structure will look like once the transformation is complete, Danny Sullivan over at Marketing Land put together a handy guide breaking down which parts of Google will be spun out as new subsidiaries. For reference, the GDP of Hungary last year was $137 billion. CEO and soon-to-be Alphabet Inc.

If you use Gmail, Chrome, Android, Search, ATAP or Google Drive, Pichai’s fingerprints are all over them and therefore there is no senior leader at Google who doesn’t have a better, more intrinsic understanding of the Google machine. It’s not yet clear how Google will restructure its various entities-in a release issued on Monday, Page promises more details “later this year“-but here’s a list of some of Alphabet’s other notable businesses”.