Google is now Alphabet, Sundar Pichai becomes the CEO of Google

Google today announced, what can be called one of the biggest restructuring in recent times. Sergey Brin and Larry Page have created a new company Alphabet which will be a collection of companies and will have Google as one of its companies. Larry will be the CEO of the company and Sergey will serve as his partner and President of the entity. IIT-Kharagpur alumnus Sundar Pichai has been named as the CEO of Google.

Larry mentioned about the founders letter to company which he wrote along with Sergey 11 years ago,

“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one. As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.”

Many products of the internet conglomerate including Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android have all more than a billion users.

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 (http://abc.xyz). I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President.

What is Alphabet?

Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies.

The largest of these companies is Google.

Companies that are pretty far afield of Google’s main Internet products will be contained in Alphabet. This includes company’s health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity). 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. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well,” said Larry.

How does this help?

The new structure allows more management scale, as the organisation can run things independently that aren’t very related. It will allow the internet search giant to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities inside of Google. Larry says,

A key part of this is Sundar Pichai. Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I’ve been tremendously enjoying our work together. He has really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our Internet businesses.

Sergey and Larry felt it was time for Sundar to be CEO of Google. “I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations. I have been spending quite a bit of time with Sundar, helping him and the company in any way I can, and I will of course continue to do that,” said Larry.

Google itself is also making all sorts of new products. Recent launches like Google Photos and Google Now using machine learning are signs of progress. Google also has some services that are run with their own identity, like YouTube where Susan is the CEO. Here are the other heads (source):

• Tony Fadell, of Nest Labs, who Page is relying on to lead hardware efforts
• Arthur Levinson, of Calico, the longevity research division
• Craig Barratt, of Fiber, the high-speed broadband service
• Dan Doctoroff, of Sidewalk Labs, the new company for cracking urban problems
• Sergey Brin, now president of Alphabet and still overseer of X, which includes Project Loon, Wing (drones) and self-driving cars
• David Lawee, who runs Google Capital
• Bill Maris, who runs Google Ventures

“Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort. We are also stoked about growing our investment arms, Ventures and Capital, as part of this new structure,” said Larry.

Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Their two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.

(image credit: WerIndia)