Meet Alphabet, Google’s New Corporate Boss As Sundar Pichai Takes Over The Search Company

Google just rocked the world with some light news on a Monday. It has restructured the company and everything will now report up to “Alphabet Inc.” a new corporate name. That includes Google, which will now be CEO’d by Sundar Pichai (one less Twitter CEO candidate).

Its site? https://abc.xyz/. Strangely enough, Google doesn’t own Alphabet.com (yet?).

BONUS: Click this period and the site links to hooli.xyz (a Silicon Valley reference)

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The CEO of Alphabet will be Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page. His missive on Google’s blog (headlined G is for Google) explains what the new holding company is:

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.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, will serve as Alphabet’s president (which includes the X lab), and Eric Schmidt will be chairman. In fact, he digs the new name:

Page went on to say:

Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President.

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I guess we don’t want to have a Google+ or Glass kerfluffle again, where a product drags the mothership through the mud. Page basically confirms this by saying:

…the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.

If they fail, they die. But they do less damage to the umbrella.

The stock will be changing over from Google to Alphabet, but still trading under GOOGL and GOOG (which were set up after its stock split). The company says this will allow them to focus on Google as a product even more than before, and at the same time, Google will also be able to better support its other businesses and moonshots.

Google’s main business will include search, ads, maps, apps, YouTube and Android and the related technical infrastructure. Nest will report up to Alphabet.

It didn’t seem that Pichai, who heads up all of Google’s most important products, had a chance at becoming Google’s CEO (ahead of Page) anytime soon. Pretty creative way to work around that, I’d say.

It looks like the stock market is reacting favorably to the announcement. Google’s…er Alphabet’s stock is up over 6 percent after hours.

Side note:

The guy who owns @alphabet on Twitter is now jacked: