back to article W is for WTF: Google CEO quits, new biz Alphabet takes over

Google CEO Larry Page has quit day-to-day management of the web giant, and made Sundar Pichai chief exec. Page and fellow Google cofounder Sergey Brin, both multibillionaires, will head up a new company called Alphabet, which will wholly own Google. "Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    As long as I get my flying exosuit..

    I really don't care!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: As long as I get my flying exosuit..

      It will just fly you to the nearest advertiser, and force you to buy things you don't need, with full access to your bank account.

      1. Fungus Bob

        Re: As long as I get my flying exosuit..

        Sounds more like the Neurostim episode of Max Headroom.

      2. BillG
        Devil

        Re: As long as I get my flying exosuit..

        Alphabet will run Google's X Lab skunkworks, along with Google's prototype drone delivery service, bio-boffinry base Calico and other advanced projects, including presumably its self-driving cars and its robotics division.

        ...giving the Google subsidiary immunity from lawsuits resulting from drone and self-driving car lawsuits.

        Which is the real reason for the creation of Alphabet. There are no legal precedents for lawsuits resulting from misbehavior of these automated drones and cars.

  2. mIRCat
    Joke

    I missed it.

    I was waiting for a characteristically Reg punchline until nearly half way through. The entire article has a first of April feel that I still cannot shake.

    Obviously the joke went over my head.

    1. solo
      Terminator

      Re: I missed it.

      Everyone missed it...seeing it coming..the storm..

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge
      WTF?

      Re: I missed it.

      I'm waiting for Steve Bong to explain what all this means.

    3. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

      Re: I missed it.

      Why bother. His Larryness already gave the punchline:

      "Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company"

      That, incidentally, has been MS battle-cry for aeons.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Would this have anything to do with the Oracle suit also?

    1. asdf

      except

      Honestly though how much money has Google itself made on Android (plenty of billable hours to decide that)? Seems the handset makers should be even more worried except Apple as usual.

      1. solo

        Re: how much money ... made on Android

        Android is waste....Happiness (Glucose) Sensing Contacts will give more alpha.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: except

        Every Android devices funnels lots of user data to Google, just like GMail, Maps, etc. The ROI is there. The problem is for the hardware assemblers, who have margins close to zero.

    2. DanielN

      An Oracle suit? That's very ... uh, very compared to the Ironman suit. Stand there while I index by the justice column, you villains!

      1. dotdavid

        "Stand there while I index by the justice column, you villains!"

        ORA-00904: invalid identifier

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Follow the Money, the Cash Flow and the new Tax Efficiencies.

  4. Florida1920
    Mushroom

    Bad boys

    À la Tony Stark, expect a division to make sophisticated and efficient weapons systems. They don't have to adhere to that suffocating "Don't be evil" mantra anymore. Nukes+ Inc., anyone? Finally, the promise of Google Earth will be realized!

    1. cd

      Re: Bad boys

      Hanging on a wall in a back room at Google, hidden from all but the highest-level visitors, is a large photo of a man jumping a motorcycle over a row of buses.

      Below it is a plaque, which says Don't Be Evel.

    2. Mage Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Bad boys

      "They don't have to adhere to that suffocating "Don't be evil" mantra anymore."

      They never have. Only an evil company needs a motto like that.

      1. Annihilator
        Thumb Up

        Re: Bad boys

        Alex Nussbaum:

        I'm not sure about Google, with their slogan: 'Don't be evil.' That's their slogan: 'Don't be evil.' ... Why bring it up? That's suspicious. That's like being on a date and hearing, "Hey, I hope you're having a good time! And don't even think about the possibility of me being a serial killer. Put it out of your mind!"

        1. Rick Giles
          Joke

          Re: Bad boys @Annihilator

          Or, "Does this rag smell funny?"

    3. Paul Kinsler

      Re: "Don't be evil"

      As has been oft said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing".

      (I /think/ I remembered that correctly, didn't I..? :)

      1. Lars Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: "Don't be evil"

        I think they have been asking us not to be evil.

  5. GrumpyOldBloke

    Foreign governments can keep their god damm stinking paws off of us. Transfer pricing, licence fees, research fees, ip fees, consulting fees and company dividends here we come.

  6. Mark 85

    Up to no good or just some tax shenanigans?

    I guess the men who would be kings need some freedom from the boardroom... or the taxman. It will be fun to watch where this goes... or scary... either way.. popcorn anyone?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Up to no good or just some tax shenanigans?

      Up to no good or just some tax shenanigans?

      Why choose? Those are not mutually exclusive options :).

      From an external perspective I have but two observations:

      - it will be interesting to see what happens to the prosecutions galore they have ongoing. I'm not sure what happens to a court case when a company in court changes shape, but I can imagine that not being a good thing for the case. Having said that, I agree that this very much looks like an attempt to isolate capital from the court cases in progress. I guess the lobbying got either too expensive or simply didn't work out.

      - who has my data now?

      1. JetSetJim

        Re: Up to no good or just some tax shenanigans?

        - it will be interesting to see what happens to the prosecutions galore they have ongoing. I'm not sure what happens to a court case when a company in court changes shape, but I can imagine that not being a good thing for the case.

        Has no impact on deciding if there were shenanigans going on - the case is pertinent to events in the past from when the case was brought. The interesting bit now will be working out who will be punished, and by how much, if the court decides someone was naughty

    2. Alistair
      Linux

      Re: Up to no good or just some tax shenanigans?

      @Mark 85, no thanks, Michael Jackson will be here shortly to steal your popcorn.

    3. Mark 65

      Re: Up to no good or just some tax shenanigans?

      It would be quite interesting to see the precise structuring of the company. I'd imagine that previously they could dip into the overseas post-"tax" funds of Google to fund different projects. If Google is now owned by Alphabet, like some of these other cash drains/projects, how does alphabet get money to invest? It'd be easy to say "from the multi-billionaires" but typically such people like to accumulate rather than risk extracted income/wealth and how liquid is their wealth vs how much is effectively sat in a tax haven?

  7. Nanners

    Your new AI robot overlord

    The new company is handling all those dark, disturbing and very evil war robot and AI products that we will all be subservient to (no joke). The robot wars have begun. #prep your children.

    1. Achilleas

      Re: Your new AI robot overlord

      See, you *say* "no joke", but I'm really not sure you mean it.

  8. Eric Olson

    Berkshire Hathaway comes to mind...

    Mostly because I'm not even close to the first to think or publish something about it. The FT's take (and other places) seems to be that they are taking a page out of Warren Buffett's playbook (which is taken from and copied by many others) to create a giant holding company that is the nominal owner, but let the the wholly owned subsidiaries run their own business.

    Now, whether they run it the same way Berkshire Hathaway does things or more like the General Electrics of the world remains to be seen. The announcement sounds like Buffett... but that's a man who really could not care less about the day-to-day operations of a company unless he's looking to buy them in the first place. And he's a man who has a nearly 70 year track record of doing just that.

    1. Mystic Megabyte
      Stop

      Re: Berkshire Hathaway comes to mind...

      Or maybe it will be like the Swiss coffee beans that Starbuck has to buy. Alphabet license the fonts that Google has to use. Cost: One use of one character = one cent

  9. Justin Clements

    Return

    When do the Google pair reach a point where they've spent so much money on researching things, and doing stuff that no one wants, that the investments will never recoup any of the large outlay? We've got to be getting close to that point.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Return

      "doing stuff nobody wants"?? I think the revenue streams of Google etc do show that people want their products. whether they need them is a different matter.

    2. Tony S

      Re: Return

      Charles Duell was supposed to have said "Everything that can be invented, has been invented". As it happens, he didn't, but a lot of people still misquote him.

      The fact is that we don't know what new ideas people will dream up; or how they will be applied in the future. They only have to hit the jackpot once for hundreds of failed ideas for it to be a successful method of working.

    3. Eric Olson

      Re: Return

      I just heard this a few days ago, and I apologize to the person or program I'm going to paraphrase without credit, but here goes.

      Back when I was a kid, the media and movies promised me hoverboards, flying cars, and video calls. Instead what I got 30 years later were mini-computers in my pocket that can make video calls, but are really much better at email, chat, and other things I enjoy. Rather than hoverboards and flying cars, we are very close to self-driving cars, have mostly self-flying planes, and the vast majority of human knowledge is a few searches away on that computer in my pocket. And medical technology is to a point where things that killed most people in the 80s are now survivable and even recoverable.

      I think I rather like what actually happened instead of what futurists thought might happen. The only way that we got here was through the liberal and sometimes absolutely insane applications of time and money to problems we either didn't know we had or problems that once were thought insurmountable. The latter alone could take trillions of dollars and billions of hours.

  10. Charles Manning

    Pretty basic business siloing, surely

    Google is a huge corp dabbling in many things.

    If they all feed out of the same bank accounts etc, then a problem in one business unit can bring down everything.

    Spinning up an umbrella company with lots of minion companies makes a lot of sense. You can easily contain risk, you can sell off companies, ...

    For example, if a fleet of there robocars goes noddy and they end up being sued for billions, it is much easier to contain the damage if the companies are legally firewalled.

    This is exactly why conglomerates like 3M consist of many smaller companies.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Big Brother

    still shilling for the NSA though

  12. ntevanza

    If I'm bored with Google

    imagine how poor Larry and Sergey must feel.

    1. this

      Re: If I'm bored with Google

      Thank God you translated 'bored of Google' to 'bored with Google' - there's still a few of us left.

  13. Wedge

    Rather than Alphabet, I know of a few more promising names they should of used... Skynet, Umbrella Corp, Buy and Large, Oscorp, Omni Corp.

    1. Rich 11

      Weyland-Yutani?

    2. nesh

      +1 for OCP, it matches their personality much better ;)

  14. RyokuMas
    Devil

    Pre-emptive strike

    So Google can break itself up with Alphabet buying up all the component companies, thus bypassing anything monopolies and mergers can do....

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  15. Buzzword

    Tricky for investors

    How are investors supposed to treat the new company? Either I'm a play-it-safe investor who wants a stable blue-chip advertising company shares, or I'm a reckless risk-taking investor chasing moonshot projects. There really ought to be separate classes of share for the two distinct parts of the business.

  16. picturethis
    Big Brother

    The marketing dept. needed something to do

    Now they have new brochures, new logos, new websites to design for new organizations and new titles and most importantly: get rid of that dammed "do no evil" slogin that everyone keeps quoting back to us every time we do (i.e. get caught doing) slimey things..

  17. Alistair Dabbs

    Wonder why they waited this long

    Tony Stark is one thing but they must have been more than a teensy bit envious of all the random fun that (real person) Elon Musk is having with his spare cash: magic cars, space rockets, etc.

    I wonder how international data protection legislation might deal with other Alphabet companies making use of Google's data farm.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Wonder why they waited this long

      I think the whole point is simply to take the skunkworks out of the ad farm stuff which makes the accounting clearer. Google's been under pressure over this recently. It's clear that Page and Brin want to continue to invest heavily in things that might eventually bring big returns (cars, health, whatever) but investors want their money now so they can spunk it on the The Next Big Thing™.

      Data protection legislation is pretty clear on use between associate companies. But I don't see the relevance here.

      1. TheOtherHobbes

        Re: Wonder why they waited this long

        The ad farm stuff has a limited shelf life. World + Dog is turning on ad blocking software, and measurable ROI is dropping.

        It may never drop to zero, but the world of SEO and CPI is past its best days.

        I don't think this is ad + skunkworks so much as ad + new thing + new thing + new thing...

        When you're a billionaire you can throw cash at researching stuff because it's fun, not because you're desperate for a fast return.

        Investors will take a while to catch on, as usual.

    2. Rick Giles
      Pirate

      Re: Wonder why they waited this long @Alistair Dabbs

      "I wonder how international data protection legislation might deal with other Alphabet companies making use of Google's data farm."

      That right there might be the end run no one saw...

  18. mhoneywell

    Picture Caption

    I thought that was fucking fabulous, "Mr Charisma."

  19. Chris Evans

    I don't understand.

    If Alphabet is going to be quoted company as reported then Page & Brin will still have all the admin responsibilities.

    But if 'Google's X Lab skunkworks' were a separate company that was owned by Alphabet then there would be be more significant separation and if Page & Brin were only involved in 'Google's X Lab skunkworks' then they could get away from the hassle of trying to keep the shareholders and Wall Street happy.

    Or have I miss read it?

  20. x 7

    business separations like this usually happen when theres a takeover in the air - or a potential financial scandal in the offing

    Look out for either a takeover or shotgun marriage involving the Google businesses, .......or a sudden announcement of "restating of profits" for the last x years

  21. CAPS LOCK

    Reg hack in poor English shocker...

    ... "are bored of Google". "bored with" please. Learn2Engrish

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Reg hack in poor English shocker...

      It is quite correct grammatically, so not a shocker.

      The fact that you do not like the construction does make it wrong.

  22. x 7

    I suppose you could say Google has a stark future

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    maybe..

    Alphabet can invest some money in securing mobile operating systems, cause Google have not...

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