Google Announces New "Alphabet" Company As Its Corporate Overlord

Google today announced Alphabet, a holding company with a collection of different assets -- with Google now being part of that umbrella. Google shares will automatically convert over to being Alphabet shares with that becoming the publicly traded company. Alphabet's CEO is Larry Page with Sergey Brin taking over as President. Meanwhile, Sundar Pichai will become Google's CEO.

This isn't some odd Alpha Fools' Day joke, but is part of a big restructuring happening at Google. Larry noted, "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...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). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related. Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed."

More details via this lengthy blog post by Google/Alphabet co-founder Larry Page.