Larry Page has announced that a major company restructure is underway, giving birth to a new company called Alphabet. Alphabet will be the parent company of a number of subsidiary former ‘Google’ companies.
Page has outlined what Alphabet is in more detail:
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).
Alphabet will be headed up by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with Larry as CEO and Sergey as President. Alphabet will include arms such as X lab, which gave birth to projects like Loon, and Glass, as well as their newest project: Wing, their drone delivery effort. Alphabet will also be home to investment arms, Ventures and Capital, which Page says he looks forward to growing in the future..
Google, obviously the largest part will be headed up by Sundar Pichai as CEO, with financials for the company separated out for Q4 this year. Alphabet will replace Google as the publicly traded company, with all Google shares automatically converted into the same number of shares of Alphabet.
There’s a lot more to come in the coming weeks as this shakes out, but it’s a big move, so we’ll have to wait and see.
Update:
There’s been some more information on the org structure of Alphabet/Google and who will be running what and at which company. The SEC filing has some tidbits on what goes where and who will be running what.
In terms of Alphabet :
- Larry Page – CEO
- Sergey Brin – President of Alphabet
- Eric E. Schmidt – Executive Chairman of Alphabet
- Ruth Porat – Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Alphabet – Ruth will remain CFO of Google as well.
- David C. Drummond – Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, Chief Legal Officer and Secretary of Alphabet
Google will be run by Sundar Pichai as we mentioned above, with Ruth Porat remaining as joint CFO for both Alphabet and Google, though no further appointments have been announced at this stage.
The Google business will retain search, ads, maps, apps, YouTube and Android – though no mention has been made of Chrome OS, it’s logical for the business to remain under Google’s control rather than be spun off into a new venture.
Google will also have Calico, Life Sciences, Nest, and Fiber managed seperately from Google, so too will the investment arms Google Ventures and Google Capital. The Google X labs project, will also be managed separately from the Google business.
Its a interesting move…. I see it as a way of them trying to seperate all these other projects out from the ‘all seeing google’ that people think that if it has a google logo on it, then you must be spied on and have ads shoved into your face!
I thought this was a prank at first
Did they mention whether Android was a subsidiary under Google or Alphabet?
Going to take some time getting used to this. 😛
No real details, but as Sundar remains head of Android And Chrome – I`m going with Google. But i`m definitely trying to find out more.