Comment by boomboomsubban
8 years ago
Alphabet was a corporate restructuring of Google, which also changed the name "Google Life Sciences" to "Verily." The search engine Google is not involved, but the company everyone knows as Google is involved.
8 years ago
Alphabet was a corporate restructuring of Google, which also changed the name "Google Life Sciences" to "Verily." The search engine Google is not involved, but the company everyone knows as Google is involved.
That's as relevant as saying "everyone knows" that the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has Microsoft involved.
In other words, not relevant at all. The money can originally have been generated by Google, and now it's invested in something completely different but that has the same ultimate owners.
People and investors can legitimately start new ventures with different missions that operate completely independently for all practical purposes. Nobody claims that The Boring Company is just Tesla, or that Tesla is just SpaceX, or that they're all just PayPal.
I don't get why people are so quick to jump on the assumption that because there are things they dislike about Google's business model or practices, the whole umbrella of Alphabet's hugely diverse set of businesses is somehow tainted by association.
Google does what it does - bad things included - thanks to the decisions of a small group of people, who is now also controlling Alphabet and its subsidiaries like Verily. It's perfectly rational to assume they have not changed the methods, management style and ethical boundaries that led to the disliked behaviors in Google.
Citation needed. To the contrary, Alphabet is an enormous conglomerate with over 100,000 employees, where the kinds of methods, styles and ethics you talk about are largely determined (successfully or not) by the director-level leader of each one (suppose ~100 people), and the leaders of Alphabet only have the time to handle the highest-level questions of coordination, investment, and biggest-picture thinking among them.
Alphabet is a complex group of people, and the idea that its operation and behavior can be reduced to just a handful of controlling people is overly simplistic. You try getting 100,000 people to follow a single method or style and see how successful you are at herding all those cats... (not to mention how famously de-centralized Google has been from the start).
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>I don't get why people are so quick to jump on the assumption that because there are things they dislike about Google's business model or practices, the whole umbrella of Alphabet's hugely diverse set of businesses is somehow tainted by association
Because Alphabet is Google. The only reason that diverse set of businesses exist are the practices previously at the same company. There is no separation like your other examples, they just changed the name.
Yep - that's true.
However, they are different companies with different staff, mission statements, and overall goals now. Conflating them to suggest that an ad company is trying to eliminate mosquitos is misleading, at best.
Alphabet is a company that still makes the bulk of its revenue from advertising, and invests that money in its other ventures. It's not misleading at all to suggest that this project is being funded by advertising revenue.
Sure, Alphabet makes a good chunk of revenue from advertising, and re-invests it. Verily is not an advertising company, even if they get some money from advertising.
Furthermore, Verily has its own profit streams, and isn't doing anything with mosquitos that increasing advertising streams to Google. The projects are unrelated. If I work on software and work and later clean my toilet at home, you wouldn't say the gloves I wear are my IDE and that I'm programming. However, I bought the gloves using money from my software development job.
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Both companies can informally be referred to as "Google." One because it runs the search engine. The other because it was known as Google until a few years ago, owns the search engine, trades as "GOOG," and a variety of reasons. It would be more misleading to refer to them as Alphabet, as everybody knows them as Google.
"everyone"? I suspect of the non-echo-chamber populous that is not on this website, 99.9% of them would "know" the search engine Google as "the company" Google.
I think you've misunderstood me, as that largely is my point. Though the company is now called Alphabet, everyone still knows them as Google.
I think you've misunderstood the parent. Everyone knows the search engine is Google. If you say "Nest" or "Waymo" or "Verily", people think of those as... Nest and Waymo and Verily. The same way when you say "Instagram" or "Whatsapp" the average person certainly does not think of Facebook.
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