In a surprise move of which no one had any inkling – Google has announced a major reorganization at the top. Google now has a new parent company, aptly called Alphabet (I love the name). Larry Page will be the CEO of the parent company, while Sergey Brin will be the President.
Google, which majorly covers all the internet business gets a new CEO as well – Indian born Sundar Pichai.
Sundar Pichai has seen a meteoric rise in Google over past year or so. In October last year he was promoted from being a Senior Vice President (Android, Chrome & Apps) to being product head of all the products which Google offers, including, search, maps, Google+, commerce and ads, and infrastructure teams. Now, as the CEO of the company he will be heading the entire Google.
The restructure has come about due to need of being more cleaner and accountable – Larry page in his official blog post wrote, “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.”
Surprisingly, Google does not still own the Alphabet domain name. But, it is expected that they will acquire it sooner, rather than later.
This Google restructure is a good thing. Google now represents far more than just search or any of their other internet services or product. They have ventured out Research & Development, Life sciences, Bio-technology and many other verticals. Google will represent their internet business, while other business can operate under different brands, yet have a single umbrella organization under Alphabet.
Another thing that we are increasingly noticing at Google is that both the original founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are wanting to get out of Internet vertical and aspiring to do work in unchartered territories and bring out the next big thing.
What may have also prompted this decision was both the founders seem to have tremendous faith in Sundar Pichai and feel that he is capable of handling Google on his own. In the announcement, Larry mentions, “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.”
This reorganization has surely taken everyone by surprise, but in my view, it looks good from all perspectives…
Now, here is the funny side of things…Microsoft immediately trolled.
While Alphabet resides at http://abc.xyz – Check out what resides at http://abc.wtf :)
