As of yesterday, most of us knew Google has one company comprised of a lot of things, such as Android, Chrome, and YouTube. That’s changing today, though.
Google CEO Larry Page has announced that the Google we know is now Alphabet Inc. Page explains that Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. that you can buy shares of, and all current Google shares will transfer over to Alphabet. Google’s not disappearing, though, because it’s becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will become Alphabet’s CEO and President, respectively, while Sundar Pichai will become the new Google CEO.
As for Alphabet, it’s going to be one company that’s actually a collection of other companies. Those will include Google as well as Life Sciences (which focuses on glucose-sensing contacts lenses), Calico (life longevity), and the X lab that focuses on new experiments. Larry Page says that this shake-up means that he and Brin will be able to better focus on the various projects that were previously inside of Google but not totally related to one another.
Obviously this is a huge shake-up for Google, with founders Page and Brin just up an creating a new company that suddenly owns Google. The biggest news for us in mobile is that Sundar Pichai is now the head of Google, which includes Android. Pichai has actually been in charge of Android since early 2013, and so it’s unlikely that we’re going to see much change for Google’s green robot, but this is still a massive change for Google and the technology world as a whole.