Alphabet Alphabet Investors is for Google As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 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.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have. more We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about. We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant. 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. 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. 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. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. We’ll also make sure we have a great CEO for each business, and we’ll determine their compensation. In addition, with this new structure we plan to implement segment reporting for our Q4 results, where Google financials will be provided separately than those for the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole.

This new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google. 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 I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company. And it is clear to us and our board that it is 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. Google itself is also making all sorts of new products, and I know Sundar will always be focused on innovation—continuing to stretch boundaries. I know he deeply cares that we can continue to make big strides on our core mission to organize the world’s information.

Recent launches like Google Photos and Google Now using machine learning are amazing progress. Google also has some services that are run with their own identity, like YouTube. Susan is doing a great job as CEO, running a strong brand and driving incredible growth. 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. 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. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG. For Sergey and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google—the birth of Alphabet. We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!

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. We are excited about… Getting more ambitious things done. Taking the long-term view. Empowering great entrepreneurs and companies to flourish. Investing at the scale of the opportunities and resources we see. Improving the transparency and oversight of what we’re doing. Making Google even better through greater focus. And hopefully… as a result of all this, improving the lives of as many people as we can. What could be better? No wonder we are excited to get to work with everyone in the Alphabet family. Don’t worry, we’re still getting used to the name too! Meet Alphabet, Google’s New Corporate Boss As Sundar Pichai Takes Over The Search Company | TechCrunch Meet Alphabet, Google’s New Corporate Boss As Sundar Pichai Takes Over The Search Company Posted Rackspace Pops 5% After Reporting Lackluster Q2 Results Buttressed By The Promise Of Share Buybacks 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? . Strangely enough, Google doesn’t own Alphabet.com (yet?). BONUS: Click this period and the site links to hooli.xyz (a Silicon Valley reference) 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: I think the Alphabet name is Awesome. — Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) August 10, 2015 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. 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 . Related Articles Google Shreds Bureaucracy To Keep Talent Loyal To The Alphabet Google Shares Spike 6% After ‘Alphabet’ Restructuring Google Is Now Alphabet, But It Doesn't Own Alphabet.com 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: Well, that was an interesting way to end a Monday… Meet Google Alphabet - Google's new parent company - Aug. 10, 2015 Meet Google Alphabet - Google's new parent company by Heather Kelly @heatherkelly August 11, 2015: 6:01 PM ET What the heck is Alphabet? Google announced a corporate restructuring on Monday, forming an umbrella company called Alphabet and naming a new CEO to the core business of Google. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will run Alphabet -- Page as CEO and Brin as president.

The company, which was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, announced its new operating structure in a blog post on Monday called "G is for Google." Related: Read full text of the blog post They also said that Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Google. Pichai has worked at Google since 2004, most recently as the senior vice president of product. Pichai has also been the most visible Google executive of late, giving the keynote at Google's annual developers conference earlier this year. Alphabet will operate as the parent company for a number of smaller companies, including Google, which will continue to focus on Internet products. Android, YouTube, search and ads will remain part of Google Inc. Other departments spinning off into their own sub-companies including research focused Life Sciences (Google contact lenses), the Google X lab (driverless cars, Google Glass, drone delivery), Calico (increasing longevity), and the company's robotics division. Google Ventures and Google Capital will also become independent Alphabet companies. The Alphabet companies will retain their current leadership. Nest will be led by Tony Fadell, Sidewalk Labs by Dan Doctoroff, and Calico by Arthur Levinson.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki will now report to Pichai. Brin will continue to head up Google X in addition to his role as president of Alphabet. Eric Schmidt will become Alphabet's executive chairman. "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," said Page in the announcement. Page said the companies would all retain a great deal of independence and be run by strong CEOs. Related: Google sneaks Hooli Easter egg into announcement The new stand-alone companies will have more freedom to take risks. They can continue to invest in experimental projects like driverless cars without interference from other units at the company, or investors worrying about the company wasting too much time and energy. Last quarter, Google posted $17.7 billion in sales, 90% of which was attributed to advertising it sold through search, partner websites, YouTube and Android. Investors have rewarded the company for its financial success by sending the stock soaring 25% this year. Shares rose another 6% after Monday's announcement. Google recorded $4.3 billion in profit last quarter, and it has $61 billion in cash.

Alphabet will continue to trade under the GOOGL ( GOOGL , Tech30 ) and GOOG ( GOOG ) ticker symbols when the change kicks in later this year. There's already a new Alphabet website, abc.xyz , which includes a hidden link to the fictional Hooli.xyz website from the HBO comedy Silicon Valley. --CNNMoney's David Goldman contributed to this report. Google wows. Will Apple, Amazon and Facebook follow? CNNMoney (San Francisco) First published August 10, 2015: 5:28 PM ET What is Alphabet, Google's new company? - Business Insider What is Alphabet, Google's new company? Aug. 10, 2015, 5:01 PM 180,587 As part of the change, the company that used to be called Google is going to become a new holding company called Alphabet. The URL for the new company is abc.xyz . Shareholders will get one Alphabet share for every Google share they previously owned.

The executives in charge of Alphabet will be the same execs in charge of Google today — CEO Larry Page, President Sergey Brin, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, CFO Ruth Porat, and chief counsel David Drummond. Alphabet includes the following entities: A smaller company called Google, headed by CEO Sundar Pichai, that includes the company's core businesses. Those businesses: "search, ads, maps, apps, YouTube and Android and the related technical infrastructure." Other businesses, "such as Calico, Nest, and Fiber, as well as its investing arms, such as Google Ventures and Google Capital, and incubator projects, such as Google X," which "will be managed separately from the Google business." Here's how the transition will happen: Later this year, Google intends to implement a holding company reorganization (the “ Alphabet Merger ”), which will result in Alphabet owning all of the capital stock of Google. Alphabet will initially be a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Google.

Pursuant to the Alphabet Merger, a newly formed entity (“ Merger Sub ”), a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet and an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Google, will merge with and into Google, with Google surviving as a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Each share of each class of Google stock issued and outstanding immediately prior to the Alphabet Merger will automatically convert into an equivalent corresponding share of Alphabet stock, having the same designations, rights, powers and preferences and the qualifications, limitations and restrictions as the corresponding share of Google stock being converted. Google to become part of new holding company, Alphabet - The Portland Press Herald increase font size Google to become part of new holding company, Alphabet While Google will remain the name for the popular Internet search engine, Alphabet will provide more independence for more far-reaching ventures. The Washington Post Read Article Google announced Monday that it is changing its operating structure and will become part of a holding company called Alphabet. Associated Press file photo Google, one of the best-known brands on the planet, on Monday radically restructured itself under the corporate name Alphabet, an almost unprecedented shift that reflects the company’s far-reaching ambitions and the vast Web it helped evolve.

The move represents Google’s biggest push yet to transcend its roots in the simple but highly profitable business of Web search and turn the company into a multifaceted General Electric for the digital age. Alphabet: What you need to know Google announced Monday that it is restructuring, creating a new company called Alphabet that will hold Google and other companies. WHY IS GOOGLE DOING THIS? Alphabet CEO Larry Page says it will provide “more management scale” and allow companies in the Alphabet portfolio to be operated independently. Page noted in a blog post that when Google was founded, its mission was not to be a conventional company. WHERE DID THEY GET THIS IDEA? Page has made no secret of how he admires Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway is a collection of companies, including Geico insurance and See’s Candies. WHO IS GOOGLE’S NEW CEO? That would be Sundar Pichai, who has had product and engineering responsibility for Google’s Internet businesses. WHAT COMPANIES WILL BE UNDER THE ALPHABET UMBRELLA? Google, for one. Also, X lab, the company’s secret research venture, and health-related ventures like Calico, focused on biology and longevity, and Life Sciences.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR FINANCIAL REPORTING? Results for the “segment” companies will be broken out separately. WHAT ABOUT GOOGLE STOCK? Here’s what the company said: “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. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.” – San Jose Mercury News Search photos available for purchase: Photo Store → In the new organization, Google’s core business, which handles two out of every three Web searches worldwide, will be a single division that will also include video giant YouTube and smartphone system Android, as well as maps, ads and apps. Other businesses in the $444 billion empire will be separate divisions under the everything-company Alphabet, investing in anti-aging research (Calico), the Internet of Things (Nest’s “smart” home thermostats), delivery drones (Project Wing), ultrafast Internet (Fiber), futuristic headsets (Glass) and driverless cars.

The unexpected change marks a speedy and potentially risky shift for the Web colossus whose name years ago became a verb, upending a corporate-America playbook that has preached reshufflings should be done dodderingly, if at all. But Google executives said the “birth of Alphabet” meant far more than corporate wordplay and would instead mark both the start of “a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google” and the dawn of a strengthening push for the future Web. “This new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google,” Larry Page, Google co-founder and Alphabet chief executive, wrote Monday in a post revealing the change. “We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes,” Page wrote. “But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.” The tech giant, one of the world’s most valuable companies, has invested heavily in the software, systems and infrastructure needed to keep its constellation of profitable breakthroughs connected.

But it has also helped finance innovations outside the walls of its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters – the Googleplex – by financing start-ups and swelling corporations though its investment arms, Google Ventures and Google Capital. Many of Google’s boldest innovations have arisen from its enigmatic research lab, Google X, including Contact Lens, a pair of glucose-measuring lenses for people with diabetes, and Project Loon, a swarm of high-flying balloons that could deliver Internet to the world’s most remote locales. But it has struggled to escape the orbital pull of the Google brand, which first whispered onto an infant Internet in 1998, the brainchild of two Stanford University students with the mission to catalogue the world’s information. Google’s sweeping expansion has not undermined its prime moneymaker, search, which has helped the company blast toward $60 billion in yearly revenue. But the unpredictable focus has led some investors and analysts to call for a narrower streamlining of its side projects, particularly when compared to titans such as Apple and Facebook, whose innovation has often served primarily to funnel users to its core enterprise. Some analysts who raised concerns about Google’s growth also wondered how well the differing businesses would get along.

Brian Wieser, a senior analyst with Pivotal Research Group, questioned how Alphabet’s collection of disparate businesses would compete for capital, particularly when comparing ventures with vastly different markets and odds of success. “Google is trying to provide incremental transparency in their business profiles,” he said, “but whether that is sufficient to make a difference remains to be seen.” Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, will become Alphabet’s president and executive chairman, respectively. Sundar Pichai, Page’s soft-spoken deputy and Google’s senior vice president, will become the search subsidiary’s chief executive. Alphabet will remain a public company, replacing the Google name in trading and in shareholders’ portfolios (but not its symbol on Nasdaq, which will stay as GOOG and GOOGL). Shares in the company surged nearly 6 percent in after-hours trading. There are risks involved with such a sweeping makeover, including in the details. Page said executives chose the name Alphabet because it “represents language, one of humanity’s most important innovations.” Yet the company could not secure Alphabet.com, which is a domain name owned by the carmaker BMW.

The main site for the new company, instead, is abc.xyz, and its Twitter handle is @alphabetinc. The Alphabet mega-umbrella also was seemingly unable to secure the Twitter handle @alphabet, which has instead been run since 2007 by a Cleveland “dad, husband and self-proclaimed geek.” His tweet after the news broke: “Well, that was an interesting way to end a Monday …” Share Why Google is restructuring, why the name Alphabet and how it affects you | Technology | The Guardian Google Why Google is restructuring, why the name Alphabet and how it affects you Much more than a renaming, the reshuffle at the US search group suggest there’s more going on than meets the eye Google will create Alphabet as a subsidiary of itself, then Alphabet will create its own subsidiary, which will merge with Google.

Photograph: Google Tuesday 11 August 2015 08.06 EDT Last modified on Thursday 13 October 2016 16.08 EDT Close This article is 1 year old If you haven’t heard of Alphabet, don’t worry: neither had most people in the world until 5pm EST (10pm BST) on Monday, when Google announced a restructuring . When it’s all done, the search company will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, a new holding company headed up by Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, formerly the bosses of Google. It may seem like a simple name change, but the reality is more complicated. Later this year, Google will create Alphabet as a wholly owned subsidiary of itself. Alphabet will then create its own wholly owned subsidiary, which will merge “with and into” Google, leaving Google – through the magic of corporate finance – a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Confused? You’re not alone. So what is Alphabet? Larry Page, the former chief executive of Google who is now in the same job at Alphabet, has a helpful answer : Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies.

It is easiest to think of the firm as a holding company, lying somewhere between Warren Buffet’s private equity firm Berkshire Hathaway and the massive conglomerate that is General Electric. Like the former, Alphabet won’t have any consumer facing role itself, instead existing almost as an anti-brand, designed to give its subsidiaries room to develop their own identities. But like General Electric, Alphabet mostly owns companies founded and managed internally. Of the major subsidiaries named in Google’s SEC filing , such as Google X, the company’s experimental division, and its longevity research firm Calico, only one, the home-automation company Nest, joined Google as part of an acquisition. That means that it is unlikely to be anywhere near as hands-off as Berkshire Hathaway, which has just 24 employees, and should give Page, Brin and Schmidt plenty to occupy their time. A cyclist and a self-driving car at Google’s HQ in California in 2012. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty What happens to Google? The old Google isn’t going anywhere. While Page describes it as “a bit slimmed down”, almost every aspect of Google that typical consumers interact with is staying a part of the new, lighter, Google 2.0.

That includes YouTube, Android, Maps and Gmail, as well as the company’s search and advertising businesses. What gets hived off are the companies “that are pretty far afield of our main internet products”, such as Calico and Life Sciences. Also separated out from Google are the company’s financial wings, soon to be known simply as Capital and Ventures. These have a history of making a lot of money for Google through investing in startups and other stocks, most notably Uber, which the company bought 6.8% of in 2013. That share alone is now worth $3.4bn (£2.2bn). In other words, even after this reorganisation, New Google will still be one of the biggest companies in the world. It’s just that Alphabet will be bigger still. The Google Maps app on a smartphone. Photograph: Dado Ruvic/Reuters Will anything change for me? The short answer is: no. The vast majority of Google’s customers only use services that will stay firmly under Google’s branding. YouTube, Gmail, search, Maps, ads, Android, photos, and more will be functionally no different from how they exist at the moment.

Some of Google’s consumer brands are being shuffled around, however. The biggest of them is Nest, started by Tony Fadell. That company was independent until it was acquired by Google in 2014 , and now it will undergo another change in corporate structure, becoming a direct subsidiary of Alphabet. Elsewhere, if you live in one of the communities served by Google’s ultra-high-speed internet provider, Google Fiber, that too is likely to drop the Google branding some time in the next year. But don’t expect it to become Alphabet Fiber either. A Nest thermostat is adjusted in a home. Photograph: George Frey/Getty Sundar Pichai: Meet the new CEO of a 'slimmed-down' Google Read more Who will head up the new Google? Once Page, Schmidt and Bryn jump over to Alphabet, Google itself is getting a new chief executive: Sundar Pichai , formerly the boss of Android and then Google’s product chief from October 2014.

So important is Pichai to Google that some have speculated that keeping him in the company is even the motivation for the entire reshuffle: rumours are flying that Pichai was tempted to jump ship to head up Twitter, and that only a chief executive title could keep him on board. Would the company really go to all this trouble to keep one man? Probably not. And it’s not clear why Pichai would want to go to Twitter, a company so small that Google could buy it outright using just the $20bn by which its market cap increased following the Alphabet announcement. Instead, the reshuffle is likely to be motivated by the reasons Page cites in his letter: allowing Google to focus on doing what it does best, without running the risk that the world will change around it and leave the company a dinosaur from another age (take a look at IBM, Nokia or Microsoft for an example of what can happen if a market leader takes its eye off the ball). Meanwhile, the other companies under Alphabet can make the gambles that will bring it dominance in new areas. graphic showing Google's new structure Why else might Google have made this move? Analysts are trying to uncover the unspoken benefits the restructuring brings Google.

For one thing, the absurdly complicated method with which it’s carried out the restructure suggests that there’s more than meets the eye. Why not just change the name of the company, for instance? The reshuffle may also provide the company a bit of insulation from regulatory issues, particularly in the EU. Google itself is still a massive beast, which will have to tread carefully around regulators, but it will be easier to present firms such as Nest, Calico and Fiber as separate entities if they are only united by a common owner. And, if the worst happens for Google, it would be easier to hive off the subsidiaries entirely. Google employees at the company’s offices in Berlin, Germany. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty But why Alphabet? A mixture of terrible jokes, grand ambition, and carefully studied banality.

The pun comes from the fact that “alpha” is a financial term meaning return on investment above the benchmark, making Alphabet a good Alpha-bet; the ambition comes from the fact that the Alphabet is one of humanity’s most important inventions, as well as the implicit claim (in the company’s abc.xyz url) that it encompasses everything from A to Z; and the banality comes from the fact that Alphabet is perhaps the most generic name imaginable, perfectly standing for anything and nothing at the same time. And for those who think that Alphabet sounds like the sinister villain of a James Bond film, we’ve got some bad news: “don’t be evil” is only Google’s motto. Alphabet has no tagline. Google Rises After Creating Holding Company Called Alphabet - Bloomberg Bloomberg the Company & Its Products Bloomberg Anywhere Remote LoginBloomberg Anywhere Login Bloomberg Terminal Demo Request Bloomberg Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world. Customer Support Advertising Bloomberg Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world.

Customer Support Google Rises After Creating Holding Company Called Alphabet Brian Womack Inside Google's New Company Called Alphabet Google Inc. rose after reorganizing into a holding company called Alphabet Inc. , breaking out its main Web operations from ambitious new endeavors such as research lab Google X and Calico, which seeks to extend human lives. The structure, announced Monday , will give greater clarity into how Google invests in various ventures, including driverless cars, high-speed Internet service and health-related technologies. It also makes it easier to make any future acquisitions or potential divestments. “There’s been a lot of speculation about how much money they put into these other ventures,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Financial. “That will come to an end. This also gives them the structure to add in another business line if they were to acquire something. The mechanism is in place.” Shares of Google gained 4.1 percent to $690.30 at the close in New York. The stock has climbed 30 percent this year, with much of the gain coming after the company reported quarterly results last month. Exclusive insights on technology around the world. Get Fully Charged, from Bloomberg Technology.

Sign Up Your guide to the most important business stories of the day, every day. You will now receive the Business newsletter Politics The latest political news, analysis, charts, and dispatches from Washington. You will now receive the Politics newsletter Markets The most important market news of the day. So you can sleep an extra five minutes. You will now receive the Markets newsletter Pursuits What to eat, drink, wear and drive – in real life and your dreams. You will now receive the Pursuits newsletter Game Plan The school, work and life hacks you need to get ahead. You will now receive the Game Plan newsletter The goal isn’t to make Alphabet a consumer brand, said Larry Page, co-founder and current chief executive officer, who will hold that title at Alphabet. Co-founder Sergey Brin will be president. Ruth Porat will remain chief financial officer of the holding company. Sundar Pichai, Page’s deputy, will be promoted to CEO of Google Inc., which generates the bulk of the company’s $60 billion in annual revenue. New Structure Omid Kordestani will transition from his role as chief business officer to become an adviser to Alphabet and Google.

“Sergey and Larry will be able to allocate their time differently between the core and non-core businesses,” said Sameet Sinha, an analyst at B. Riley & Co. “You have Sundar focusing on the core business, and you will have Larry and Sergey kind of looking at the future growth businesses.” The new structure will be introduced in phases in the coming months. Alphabet will give its results as a holding company starting with the fourth-quarter earnings report, which is usually released in January. With this move, investors will get more details on how the businesses are operating, a longstanding concern on Wall Street. Spending on projects that include everything from driverless cars to chip-embedded contact lenses has rankled investors , who aren’t sure how long it will take for the efforts to pay off. The announcement comes months after Porat joined Google in May, following a five-year stint as Morgan Stanley’s CFO. She has said Google can maintain growth even as it manages the pace of expenses. “We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes,” Page wrote in the post.

“Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable.” For anyone who owns shares of Google now, no action is required. The stock will automatically convert into Alphabet shares that represent stakes in the same collection of companies that exists today, just arranged differently. The change won’t require a shareholder vote or create any extra taxes. “The conversion will occur automatically without an exchange of stock certificates,” according to a regulatory filing. “Stock certificates previously representing shares of a class of Google stock will represent the same number of shares of the corresponding class of Alphabet stock.” Word Play While Alphabet may be an unusual choice for a multibillion-dollar Web conglomerate, it’s more mundane than the company’s name, which was considered odd before it become a household term. Page and Brin adopted Google, a misspelling of the large number Googol (1 followed by 100 zeroes), when they founded the Web-search company in 1998. “We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search!” Page said.

“We also like that it means alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!” Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. Learning Larry Page's Alphabet | Fast Company | Business + Innovation Learning Larry Page's Alphabet How Employee Burnout Became An Epidemic And What It Might Take To Fix It LinkedIn's Major Makeover Is Designed To Make You Want To Actually Use LinkedIn Bet You Didn't See This Coming: 10 Jobs That Will Be Replaced By Robots 5 Steps For Creating The Perfect Team Fast Company Staff 03.22.16 6:00 AM "It’s kind of counterintuitive," Google cofounder Larry Page remarked a couple of years ago. "Normally in a business, you think about, ‘What’s the adjacent thing that I can do?’ But maybe you can actually do more projects that are less related to each other." Back then, Page was explaining why his company—whose mission, officially, is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful—had expanded to address everything from teaching automobiles to drive to researching ways to extend the human life span. At the time, the insight seemed classic Page, a heartfelt defense of unconventional thinking.

Today it feels like something more: a premonition of perhaps the most radical, labyrinthine corporate restructuring of the digital era. Page released a letter last August announcing the reconfiguring of Google into a conglomerate called Alphabet. It described Alphabet as a new holding company that would be composed of independent operating units. The Google search engine and related businesses—including Android, Gmail, and YouTube, to name a few—would be just one of them, and although it wasn’t initially clear, Alphabet would be home to nine other companies, including Calico (the health care company whose goal is to lengthen life expectancy), Verily (the home of the company’s "smart" contact lens), X (its R&D arm), DeepMind (artificial intelligence), and Access (all of the company’s high-speed Internet initiatives). In February, Alphabet added its 11th unit when it elevated the think tank/tech incubator formerly known as Google Ideas into its own entity called Jigsaw. So what holds these far-flung enterprises together? And why have they been organized in this fashion? These are among the most critical questions facing Techland, investors, and anyone who competes with any piece of the company formerly known as Google—which includes almost everyone.

Page has been typically reclusive since announcing Alphabet. (He was not interviewed for this article.) But that does not mean we can’t make sense of this newly arranged company. Page has never been content to stand still, compelled by hyperambitious efforts that he calls moonshots. Alphabet is itself a moonshot, hoping to overcome a raft of technological, social, and financial challenges endemic to a world of increasing change. To understand this larger imperative, we’ve focused in on six areas, each epitomized by the experience of—or model established by—another leading company: Microsoft, Nike, GE, Apple, Facebook, and Google itself in its earlier days. In deconstructing Alphabet’s opportunities and risks this way, a nuanced understanding of what Page might be after emerges. If Alphabet wants to develop a "whole widget" strategy like Apple, its best option may lie in newer categories of consumer goods, such as virtual reality. So far, Alphabet is off to a rousing start: Shortly after it announced its first quarterly results in February, it briefly displaced Apple as the world’s most valuable company by stock-market capitalization (a feat that the old Google never accomplished).

As Page explained in his August letter, "We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant." Here are the revolutionary ABCs of Alphabet. A. Avoiding the Microsoft malaise In the 1980s, the mantra of Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen was "A computer on every desk and in every home, all running Microsoft software." At the time, that goal was a moonshot. When the company achieved it, Windows and Office—which eventually boasted 90%-plus shares of their respective markets—yielded landslide results. Microsoft became the most prolific profit machine in history, with margins on its core software products that no other company could approach. Until Google came along. Since then, Google’s search engine has become the preeminent utility of the modern age, with an ad-revenue stream that continues to spout enviable profit margins. But within that success lies the seeds of trouble. And that is part of what Alphabet was created to combat.

As Microsoft learned the hard way, when you have a once-in-a-lifetime business model, any other market you pursue pales in comparison. After conquering the PC world, Microsoft widened the scope of its ambition. It created the Xbox gaming system, moved into mobile, spent billions on the Bing search engine. These efforts largely disappointed: Windows Phone’s market share is now a rounding error, and Bing has never spent a year in the black. Even a blockbuster like Xbox couldn’t match the enduring windfalls generated by Windows and Office. Every dollar that Microsoft reaped on new ventures had lower margins than its core operations. Investors began to put a lower value on each dollar of Microsoft’s earnings; the stock stalled. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Microsoft developed tunnel vision, viewing every new technology wave as an opportunity to sell more Windows licenses. That, after all, was the crown jewel. Yet when Microsoft announced its first-ever dividend in January 2003, the move signaled to Wall Street that the company didn’t know what else to do with the $43 billion in cash that it had on hand. Microsoft’s status as a growth business began to crumble.

Page’s Alphabet currently has $73 billion in cash on hand—a signal of just how pertinent the Microsoft comparison is. In turning Google into Alphabet, Page has made a clear statement to investors (and employees) that he is still focused intently on growth: Unlike Microsoft, Alphabet has plenty of areas in which to invest its cash. Even the streamlined Google unit has its own portfolio of moonshots, from virtual reality to machine learning. As Page noted in his letter, his company has done many things that people thought odd over the years and "many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android." One way to understand Alphabet is as a vehicle to build essential physical infrastructure in the real world. What if you were to build a next-generation GE today? What’s more, Page’s new structure has made it simple for investors to value the dollars coming from Google as distinct from the performance of the rest of Alphabet’s units. And Google looks stronger than ever. Revenue grew 18% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2015, with full-year revenue reaching $74.5 billion.

Since more than $3 billion in costs have now been shifted to other Alphabet units, Google’s profitability looks better too. Of course, to be a long-term success, Alphabet needs to prevent Google’s mammoth advertising business from becoming a crutch (or, worse, an albatross). That’s where the entirety of Page’s new structure comes in. By giving the Google operating unit more focus, the organization can adapt more swiftly and become a better version of itself. The same holds true for Alphabet’s other business units, which now have their own autonomy—and expectations. —Harry McCracken B. Becoming Nike . . . sorta Hoverboards. Jet packs. Internet balloons. Agile (and terrifying) humanoid robots. Teleportation technology. We revere Alphabet for toying with these sci-fi pursuits. What other company would consider developing space elevators? Page has profound ambitions for these projects. Perhaps one day they’ll better humanity or transform the company’s core business.

Lofty goals: Extending wireless Internet service to places cell towers can’t reach is among Alphabet’s many world-changing plans.Photo: Lincoln Else , courtesy of Alphabet But for now, these "other bets" are splashing red ink on Alphabet’s income statement: $3.6 billion in losses in 2015, an 83% increase from the previous year. Many people view these gambits as Page and Alphabet’s president Sergey Brin’s folly, a collection of extravagant, imprudent distractions. Here’s another way to view the company’s costly moonshot habit: as a marketing expense. If there’s anything the Mountain View, California–based tech company effectively manufactures, it’s the mythology around itself. These fantastical ideas create a glowing halo around the company, fostering the perception that Alphabet is a place where magic happens, where the most innovative minds, from iPod creator Tony Fadell to life sciences’ chief Andy Conrad, come to tinker.

In spite of Alphabet’s intent to be a holding company and not a brand, with each headline-stealing rumor of unrealized futuristic inventions within one of its divisions—X kills more than 100 concepts per year but makes sure we know about some of those too (including most recently an "automated vertical farming" system and a "lighter-than-air, variable buoyancy cargo ship")—an army of new fans gets minted. No one has used this R&D–as-marketing framework to better effect than Nike. Its sprawling headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, contain several "not-so-secret" secret research labs, such as the Innovation Kitchen, where top scientists and athletes invent the future of performance wear. Hushed excitement for what takes place in these labs energizes employees and consumers alike. The labs create a fine mist that helps keep the swoosh dewy and fresh, reinforcing the fact that Nike is special, different, and synonymous with cutting-edge culture. Nike doesn’t enlist the graffiti artist Futura 2000 or graphic designer Geoff McFetridge to create limited-edition products because they will deliver huge earnings. Just as with those secret labs, the collaborations animate Nike’s dream factory.

Nike employees aren’t just making shoes and apparel; they’re part of something bigger: a global cultural movement of empowerment and fitness. That framing helps Nike with everything from brand value to employee retention. For Alphabet’s employees, the vast majority of whom work at Google, perhaps it’s not always so special to toil on search-engine algorithms and advertising optimization. Yet the big goals within Google, to connect more users and advance machine learning, are noble and inspiring, and, thanks to Alphabet’s moonshots, staffers are also engaged in a larger futuristic vision, a place full of "Peter Pans with PhDs," as X’s Astro Teller puts it, where "you’ll find an aerospace engineer working alongside a fashion designer and former military ops commanders brainstorming with laser experts." Connecting the quotidian digital advertising business to this culture yields immeasurable benefits. Let’s reconsider that $3.6 billion Alphabet lost last year on its moonshots. Apple and Microsoft invested roughly the same amount combined on marketing, while Samsung spent nearly four times that. Many of Page’s bets, such as Nest, the smart-home-products company, have significant potential to benefit Alphabet’s business in the long term. And in the near term they reinforce a distinctive culture.

Which, by the way, may be the best advertising of all. —Austin Carr C. Channeling GE Go to Alphabet’s website, abc.xyz, and you’ll see a pile of wooden alphabet blocks. Unlike Google’s home page, there is no blank white box and blinking cursor awaiting your command. You can’t click on the blocks to learn more about Alphabet’s companies; it’s just a photo! But in that picture is a wink: A single block is turned on its side, revealing a bright blue G. Alphabet is, in essence, a pile of blocks ready to build the Google of our physical world. Google itself is our essential digital infrastructure: Search, email, navigation, documents. One way to understand Alphabet, then, is as a vehicle to build essential, modern, tech-powered physical infrastructure in the real world. The analogy here is to General Electric, the original technology conglomerate (before technology required software). It’s not that Alphabet plans to displace GE, rather that it seeks to develop GE–like businesses. What if you were to build a next-generation GE today? Instead of wind turbines and aircraft engines, you might try clean-energy kites and self-driving cars.

You’d develop contact lenses that measure blood sugar (Verily), create hacks to our genetic code (Calico), and devote initiatives to robots (Replicant) and drones (Project Wing). You’d design cities where the physical environment is smart and reactive to human presence (Sidewalk Labs). Nearly every department inside Alphabet is building real, physical things, like burly arms to Google’s omniscient hive mind. As it happens, GE is moving more into the virtual world just as Alphabet moves toward the physical one. GE is using software to optimize the deployment of airplanes, locomotives, mining operations, oil rigs, wastewater treatment plants, wind turbines, and even city streetlights. Its Predix cloud platform serving these industries is a $5 billion business and growing; its energy-focused Industrial Internet of Things unit, Current, has another $1 billion–plus in annual revenue. (By comparison, all of the non-Google Alphabet companies combined generated just $448 million in revenue in 2015, with most of it coming from Nest.) —Mark Wilson D.

Dreaming of Apple If Microsoft is the company Alphabet fears becoming, Apple, with its financial might and cultural heft, is the company it aspires to be—though you’ll be hard-pressed to find folks at the Googleplex who will admit it. Apple has something that Alphabet doesn’t. From the beginning, when Apple introduced the Apple I, in 1976, it offered consumers a cohesive experience. That’s because cofounder Steve Wozniak personally engineered both the machine and its software from scratch. Four decades later, Apple is still building what Steve Jobs liked to call "the whole widget"—hardware, software, and services blended into a (mostly) seamless whole. It even custom-designs processors for the iPhone and iPad. This profoundly ambitious undertaking lets it create new experiences and control them, not only wringing as much juice as possible out of its batteries but as much profit as possible out of its products. By contrast, there’s Android. When Google announced its smartphone operating system in 2007, it made its platform free to hardware makers, released the source code, and encouraged other companies to dig in and tweak it to their liking.

"We hope thousands of different phones will be powered by Android," said Eric Schmidt, Google’s then–CEO. If anything, Schmidt may have underestimated just how potent the Android proposition would be. Today, more than 8 out of 10 smartphones sold globally run the software, as well as tens of thousands of other devices, including tablets, watches, TVs, video-streaming boxes, cameras, and more, giving Google access to consumers on a scale that competitors can only fantasize about. Yet as dazzling as the Android story is, it doesn’t present a happy ending, because Google gave up two things to achieve this ubiquity. The first is profit potential. According to Oracle’s calculations in a lawsuit against Google, Android has lifetime revenue of $31 billion and profits of $22 billion. In contrast, in just the last three months of 2015, strong iPhone sales helped Apple score $75.9 billion in revenue and $18.4 billion in profit. In fact, Apple captures a staggering 94% of the smartphone industry’s profits, according to research firm Canaccord Genuity.

The Android market has become highly commoditized, with many companies selling basic, me-too phones at a razor-thin profit, if not a loss. The conventional wisdom that Android’s massive market share would reduce the iPhone to near irrelevancy—as Windows did to the Mac in the 1990s—hasn’t panned out. Perhaps worse for Alphabet is its lack of control. Because Apple owns its environment, it can get new features into consumers’ hands with minimum friction. In September 2015, Apple and Google both updated their smartphone operating systems. Four months later, Apple’s iOS 9 was installed on 75% of iPhones. Conversely, phone makers and wireless carriers are notorious for holding up new releases of Android. Google’s new version, the excellent Marshmallow, had reached a measly 1.2% of Android users, leaving the remaining 98.8% running outmoded software. Google can’t even depend on Android as a source of eyeballs to look at its ads. Manufacturers are free to de-Googlize the Android experience—and often do. Everyone from Amazon to Chinese phone giant Xiaomi sells devices that replace preinstalled Google services with their own offerings.

"What have these manufacturers done?" technology industry analyst and former Apple executive Michael Gartenberg envisions Google asking itself. "They’ve taken our children and are dressing them funny. This just isn’t the way things should be." Google has been trying to impose more of its authority on licensees to keep the full suite of Google apps. A report last November on the tech news site The Information stated that the company is toying with the idea of designing its own chips, just as Apple has been doing for years. Still, having offered up Android to the world as an open platform, Google can’t simply say "never mind!" and reclaim it as a proprietary operating system à la iOS. Another way to view Alphabet’s moonshots is as marketing expenses. No one has used this R&D-as-marketing framework to better effect than Nike. If Alphabet and Google want to develop a "whole widget" strategy, their best option may lie in newer categories of consumer goods. That helps explain why Page spent $3 billion acquiring smart-home innovator Nest, now one of Alphabet’s autonomous operating units. And then there’s the white space of virtual reality.

Cardboard, the minimalist system that lets consumers turn smartphones into bare-bones VR headsets using third-party gizmos that cost as little as $15, offers a fun, populist experience. Although Cardboard is likely too rinky-dink to pose a serious threat to technology platforms like Facebook’s Oculus Rift, in January, the Google unit signaled that it was ramping up its VR aspirations by naming a longtime company exec, Clay Bavor, as its first VP of virtual reality. A month later, sources told the Wall Street Journal that Google was at work on a much higher-end VR headset, with its own display, processor, sensors, and cameras. That’s what Steve Jobs would have called the whole widget—and a sharp break from Android’s let-a-thousand-gadgets-bloom approach. —Harry McCracken E. Entering the Facebook zone During Google’s annual stockholder meeting last June—the last it would have as "Google"—the company’s top executives sat on stage as audience members lobbed questions at them that ranged from fantastical to inane. One attendee pestered chairman Eric Schmidt and Page about avoiding a Matrix-like dystopian future.

Finally, near the end, a pressing query: "How do you see ad blockers affecting your revenue source?" The question tapped into a prevailing concern about Google’s business: While dominant on desktop, it risked being eclipsed on mobile, particularly by Facebook and its growing hold on both consumers and advertisers. According to the research group ComScore, 87% of mobile usage is within apps, where ad blocking isn’t yet an issue and where Facebook rules. Page, becoming animated, answered, "The industry needs to get better at producing ads that are less annoying and that are quicker to load. We’ve been kind of trying to pioneer that." Page’s response signaled two things: that mobile could be vitally important for Google and, more subtly, that Alphabet was not about to cede the app universe to rivals like Facebook. Since that meeting, Google has reported that mobile searches have surpassed desktop ones worldwide and that it has developed several initiatives to tailor its results and ads. "We are seeing a major shift in consumer behavior toward micro moments," recently elevated Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated during Alphabet’s first earnings call three months later.

"These are moments of high intent when consumers are looking to find, buy, or do something." Google introduced a new product that helps marketers reach existing customers via search. And as an example of the types of things Google can now do for advertisers, last fall Dunkin’ Donuts ran a mobile search campaign so that when people searched for "coffee near me," it assessed both walking distance and wait times to steer people to the fastest cup of java. In terms of the app-scape, Google has now indexed more than 100 billion links within third-party apps so that 40% of searches return results from within an app in the top five. It also launched a clever feature that lets users download or "stream" mobile apps directly from search, providing that in-app info more quickly. Google credits all these advancements with being the primary driver of its revenue growth in the last six months of 2015 (although the company, unlike Facebook, does not break out financials for its mobile business). Overlooked in the sometimes simplistic analysis of Facebook being the present and the future (mobile) and Google owning the past (browser) is that Google, unlike Facebook, has strength in both areas.

Notably, Google has five of the seven most popular apps in the United States, with YouTube at No. 2 and Google Search, Play, Maps, and Gmail in slots 4 through 7. (Facebook and Facebook Messenger take positions 1 and 3.) Meanwhile, Google has continued to deepen its dominance on the open web. In February, Google launched what it calls Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open-source initiative that enables publishers to build clean, lightweight versions of web pages, stripping out the glut of data-intensive back-end technologies so that pages load almost instantaneously. Several ad formats are restricted from AMP, and publishers are incentivized to comply: Faster-loading sites can lead to a higher ranking in Google’s search index. If this sounds somewhat like Facebook Instant Articles, you’re right, except it’s for the whole Internet. Facebook wants to provide users with a big, blue sanctuary from the awful mobile web lurking outside, while Google is seeking to renovate the mobile web by blurring the lines between it and an app-like experience.

This is a classic Google gambit—refusing to accept an "either-or" when it can transform it into an "and." The same inclusive thinking is evident in Google’s approach to attracting the next several billion users to adopt its services. "We believe that someone in Indonesia should get the same quality email service or search results as someone in New York," Pichai told investors, taking a light jab at Facebook and its controversial "Free Basics" service that provides only limited access to the web. "From providing Internet access in India’s railway stations to making Chromebooks available throughout the region, it reinforced what a huge opportunity we have to help the next billion users come online and to have great experiences with the whole Internet once they are there." Facebook and Google will continue to spar in their efforts to get more than 5 billion people online and in their use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to be more useful to those billions. Although Google may no longer deliver Facebook’s current growth rates of more than 40%, its steady stream of significant enhancements keeps the company poised to deliver double-digit growth for the next several years. And as the analyst Colin Sebastian with Robert W.

Baird said, "Growth in the teens is still very profitable, and that is what helps fund these other projects." —J.J. McCorvey F. Feeling Googly, all over again One of the most renowned stories in Google’s history occurred on a Friday in 2002, when Page grabbed a printout of the ads that accompanied search results, wrote "these ads suck" on it, and then posted it in the company kitchen. He wasn’t trying to belittle anyone. He wanted someone to fix a problem he’d discovered. By the following Monday, as then–CEO Eric Schmidt recounts in his book How Google Works, engineers had a solution that dramatically improved Google’s AdWords product. Larry PagePhoto: David Black Page, like most techno-futurists, would seem to be immune to bouts of nostalgia. But recapturing that Friday-to-Monday problem solving of Google’s halcyon days, when it was first turning on what would become the greatest business model of all time, may be an exception. In the most basic ways, Alphabet is an effort to re-create that lost weekend, at the scale of Page’s ambitions today. The new conglomerate is theoretically designed to make change happen faster.

In his letter announcing Alphabet, Page delineated several things that he is excited about in the transformation. One is "getting more ambitious things done." Another is "empowering great entrepreneurs and companies to flourish." His hope for the Google unit specifically is to get "even better through greater focus." Page needs his company to remain competitive in the face of the most significant threats it has ever faced—from Apple and Facebook but also the likes of Amazon and Pinterest. And to do so, he needs tens of thousands of employees to embrace the speed that epitomizes Google’s search engine itself. This is why Alphabet is more than just a spectacular corporate reengineering. Page picked the perfect time to reset his company—at the very moment that analysts were heralding Peak Google. He knew that traditional corporate structure limits innovation at the pace he wants and needs. He broke his business into smaller pieces to make them simpler and focused them more narrowly to discourage drift and distraction, while trying to maintain the advantages of scale and resources and a compelling culture to recruit talent. Page isn’t ready to settle for status quo.

He wants to make the world a better place—with electric cars and smart cities and universal Internet access and no more disease—and also find lucrative new businesses that keep the company part of the present and future. He wants everything, from A to Z. —David Lidsky A version of this article appeared in the April 2016 issue of Fast Company magazine. Never miss a story. Sign up for the Fast Company newsletter and get the best stories delivered to your inbox daily. Send Google Becomes Alphabet: What Wall Street's Saying - TheStreet TheStreet Markets Today Google Becomes Alphabet: What Wall Street's Saying Google announced that it would no longer exist as a corporation, becoming a division of holding company, Alphabet. Wall Street loves it. Chris Ciaccia Aug 11, 2015 8:41 AM EDT NEW YORK ( TheStreet ) -- Google ( GOOG ) ( GOOGL ) announced that it would no longer exist as a corporation, instead becoming a division of holding company, Alphabet, sending shockwaves throughout the tech and investing community. Under the new structure, Larry Page will become CEO of Alphabet, with Sergey Brin becoming President of Alphabet.

Sundar Pichai (pictured above) will move from being Product Chief to becoming CEO of Google. Google will continue to house the company's core search business, as well as YouTube, Chrome, Android, maps and advertising. Under Alphabet will be Calico, a biotech company focused on anti-aging and led by former Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, Nest, the Internet-connected home devices company, Google Fiber, Google Ventures and Google X, the company's incubator which includes the company's self-driving car project as well as the newly announced Google, its drone delivery business. News of the new reporting structure sent shares higher, with Alphabet's Class A shares (GOOGL) up 5.5% in early Tuesday trading to $699.50, while the Class C shares (GOOG) rose 5.9% to $671.20. Wall Street analysts have been praising the move, noting it gives investors more clarity on what is driving revenue and gives a picture of the sense of the true profitability of Google's core business.

Here's what several of them had to say: Deutsche Bank analyst Ross Sandler (Buy, $840 PT) "Google has been our top pick in 2015 owing to: 1) its discounted valuation vs. peers, 2) prevailing negative sentiment, 3) our belief that innovation is alive and well, and that Google management cares about its stock price, and 4) these management change periods are historically very good signals toward unlocking shareholder value. These latter two factors are becoming clearer with two significant events playing out this year: A) operating margin turning from imploding to now up Y/Y, and B) the newly announced push toward cleaner financial disclosure and new operating structure. Why Google Became Alphabet, Explained In 120 Seconds | TechCrunch Why Google Became Alphabet, Explained In 120 Seconds Posted You Can Now Run Windows 10 On Your Mac What are the pros and cons of Google reorganizing itself as Alphabet? Well, Larry gets to play with the future, Google can focus on more ambitious projects , and it could help the company retain top talent . But will the independent Alphabet company CEOs get frustrated relying on Larry for resources?

Here’s everything you need to know in a quick two minute video. 0

Question: Alphabet became in 2015 the holding company of which vast tech corporation?
Answer: Google