Comment by bun_at_work
8 years ago
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.
Look, it's pretty simple.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/02/alphabet-business-units-reve...
Google makes the bulk of its revenue from advertising. Google generates substantial profits. The non-Google parts of Alphabet are, as a group, running at a loss. Google's advertising profits are used to subsidize Alphabet's "other bets."
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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.