It’s just another day in the tech world, when Google drops some big news. However, with the Internet conglomerate’s latest announcement, some have speculated that this big news is actually making Google… smaller?
In a post published to Google’s blog on Monday, August 10th, CEO Larry Page explained that Google will be experiencing some corporate restructuring; namely, that an umbrella company, named Alphabet, Inc., will now act as holding company of which Google is a subsidiary branch.
“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,” Page explained in the announcement blog post.
In the post, Page goes on to explain that Alphabet was created so different projects and business ventures that do not have much to do with each other are able to have the “strong leaders and independence” needed for them to succeed. Under this model, each subset company will have its own CEO, with Page and his partner, Sergey Brin, acting as the executive heads of parent-company Alphabet. Sundar Pichai, who worked most recently as the Senior Vice President of Product for Google, has been named Google’s new CEO.
While other branch companies under Alphabet, such as Calico, Nest and Fiber, exist within a number of different industries, Google Inc. will continue to focus on Internet products and remains involved with Android and YouTube.
Towards the end of the blog post, Page wrote, “I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products–the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.”
In other words, it would appear that Alphabet is now becoming the parent (company) of the star-child that is Google, and it is excited to start adding more members to the family–or, letters to the Alphabet.