Google to restructure into new holding company called Alphabet

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/10/google-alphabet-parent-company

Google is dead. Long live Alphabet.The tech company announced on Monday that it would rebrand itself as Alphabet – a new holding company whose largest wholly owned subsidiary will be Google.

In a surprise blog post made public after the stock markets closed Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders, announced a radical shake-up of the company’s corporate structure and management, handing control of its core search engine business to rising star Sundar Pichai.
The new company, Alphabet, will preside over a collection of companies, the largest of which will be Google. Even the site’s new address also eschewed convention, https://abc.xyz/

Some analysts were sceptical about the level of clarity the move would actually add to Google’s financial statements.“On balance the news is positive,” wrote Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser, “as this provides for incremental transparency into Google’s business and suggests the company is looking for ways to balance founder and employee interests with those of investors.”
Wieser added a note of caution, though, saying that it wasn’t clear how much of its quarterly financial info Google was anxious to share.
“It may be overly optimistic at this point to hope for discrete business unit break-outs,” he wrote, noting that major holes in investor knowledge included Google Display Networks, which Wieser estimated at $5bn by itself.
It remains to be seen whether Google will simply continue to tell shareholders to be content with their profits when it comes to some major business segments.

Page characterized the Google to come as “slimmed down”. Companies that are “pretty far afield of our main Internet products” will be contained in Alphabet, he said. Google’s health efforts like Life Sciences and Calico, a division investigating aging and other diseases, will have their own chief executives. Non-Google divisions of Alphabet will also include X lab and Wing, its drone delivery effort, as well as Nest, its “internet of things” division.

Wonder where the newfound tax loophole is.