So, Google dropped a cluster bombshell revealing it’s forming an Alphabet, a holding company for Google’s many businesses. So, like… why?
Why Google is renaming itself “Alphabet” (vox.com).
“Google started as a company that built a search engine, but over time it’s become a lot more than that. The Mountain View, California, company has created a number of other hugely popular internet products, including Android, Chrome and Gmail. More recently, the company has begun pouring resources into projects like self-driving cars, anti-aging technology, and balloon-powered internet access.
Not all work out though, and along with anti-aging technology they seem to be giving resurrection a try too: Google Glass is back! But now it’s for businesses (theguardian.com).
So, doing more than just search and offering targeted ads to pay for it is more more than one company “Goggling” for it can handle:
“[Google founders] Page and Brin believe that these projects have become too diverse and sprawling for a single operating company to manage all of them effectively. Different projects require different types of leaders, different company cultures….’
Including one “company culture” that’ll not upset or look silly wearing those Google Glasses.
“Page hopes that giving the various parts of the Google empire more autonomy will make it easier for them to stay outside their comfort zones and push the technological envelope. … Like many founders, Page and Brin are more excited about launching new ventures than they are about managing existing ones. The new structure will allow them to periodically create new projects and then hire others to handle day-to-day operations.’
And make those that they leave those “various parts”—often purchased rather than invented (mergers and acquisitions by Google, Wikipedia)—that are left languishing easier to walk away from giving founders Page and Brin room to change the world with projects like driverless cars or Wi-Fi-beaming balloons which may or may not… in short appeasing investors worried by its seeming big spending but lack of focus, and, if they have already big spent printing all the company logo stationary there could well be a lack of focus playing Alphabet soup:
Should’ve googled it first! BMW owns Alphabet.com and has no plans to sell it to Google’s new parent company (dailymail.co.uk).
Alpha-bet.com perhaps?
Updates/Follow Ups
30th January 2016
Alphabet? Google? Either way, it’s ready to rumble (cnet.com).
“Next week Page and Brin will give us our first real glimpse inside Alphabet, a new corporate structure that makes several of the company’s divisions, including the Google search engine itself, subsidiaries. … For those of us who use Google’s online apps and services, like Gmail and Google Docs, nothing really changes. The reorganization is mostly business jujitsu, intended to make investors happier by separating the money-making business engines from the projects still getting up to speed. ”
And that’s the spoken vowel or avowal of it; no matter how much Page and Brin supposedly wish “to have their now-giant tech company feel once again like a scrappy startup” it has not been that for a very long time and will not be again if they wish to keep those investors—not quite as “dedicated” to changing the world until it has shown a profit—on board. Why do I feel it may give Brin all the more time to play a digital equivalent of roller hockey, for his own indulgence at least, like the article suggests in the opening paragraphs.
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