Google has always wanted to be the alpha and omega of the internet, but no one expected it would try to own the very alphabet. In a sudden, eyeball-arresting announcement, the world’s most watched technology company has announced big-bang restructuring, the most massive element of which is the hatching of a holding company named Alphabet, located at https://abc.xyz. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are CEO and president. Google Inc is now a subsidiary company led by Sundar Pichai, and the high-risk “moonshot” projects that Google adores have been hived off.
This is stuff that Wall Street understands, and the firewalling of risk kicked Google stock up by 6 per cent. But the punters must be slightly confused, too, since the stated purpose of the restructuring is to allow engineers to wrest charge of projects from administrators and business heads, live dangerously like in a startup and work on more moonshots. Indeed, some moonshots, like the life-extension project Calico, could turn into perpetual-motion revenue generators. And Android was once a gleam in some bloodshot, moonshot eye — an audacious plan to take on the entrenched giants of mobile telephony armed only with a Linux kernel. Post restructuring, Google could again be a lean, nimble technology-led company, unafraid to innovate.
