Comment by ardy42
8 years ago
> It's very different. They are literally different companies with different mission statements.
Only if you care an unusual amount about that corporation's org charts. Corporate mission statements are meaningless, except to an even smaller group of people.
Insisting that Alphabet isn't Google, is sort of like insisting that Puffs [1] tissues aren't Kleenex. While it may technically be true in some legalistic sense, a vanishingly small number of people actually care and colloquial language disagrees. People will look at you funny if you act like the distinction matters, because it doesn't.
The distinction matters a lot for Google and Verily because they have different motivations.
If you are trying to understand what incentives impact the company, you have to address them specifically. Google is incentivized by the drive to make profits from advertising. This leads them to do many things that are predictable. Verily has different motivations, which change predictions about them. Their parent is motivated to make profit exclusively, so you can make predictions around that.
It absolutely matters when two companies are different, especially if you actually want to understand the situation, motivation, etc.
I'd agree that it doesn't matter to the average person who isn't interested in discussing topics related to the company, and colloquially, the terms are used interchangeably, which is fine. However, for discussing the moral, ethical, legal, etc, issues around the company, it's important to make the distinction to more accurately understand and predict future behavior.
In the case of this click-bait-titled article, it does matter though, as Google has a publicly understood identity, which has no business playing with mosquitos. Verily is in the business of life science, and therefore has plenty of business with mosquitos.
Conflating the two in this context first makes the company recognizable to the general public, probably the point of the mis-representation in the title, but second, it serves to lead the suspicious people on HN and elsewhere to wonder how Google is making destroying the environment profitable in advertising, which is so far from what's going on it would be laughable, if it wasn't so dangerous to the actual scientific and policy dialog that should happen around the topic.
"Corporate mission statements are meaningless, except to an even smaller group of people."
They are point blank different companies.
Different CEO, HR, contracts, locations, resources.
The only thing they have are common ownership.
There might be some hints in strategic overlap.
They are more like 'different companies' than they are 'the same company'.
They could be peeled off from their parent owner and much would be the same.
> The only thing they have are common ownership.
Companies that are actually independent besides common ownership don't share a stock symbol and they don't comingle revenues.
Any company that owns 51% or more of another company has to put the owned company on their balance sheet.
It's legally a subsidiary and must have 'co mingled' accounting.
Also there's no reason for Alpha to break out revenues in their reports if they don't want to.
The whole point of Alpha was to in fact treat the sub companies as effectively independent, which is mostly what is going on.
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Do you happen to work for Google/Alphabet or have you in the past? I imagine that the distinction is actually pretty meaningful and important for people who work there, but pretty meaningless to everyone else in the world who doesn't.