Comment by crazygringo
8 years ago
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).
That's all is not a change of "the methods, management style and ethical boundaries", is it? For example, to change it to a strict enforcement of certain ethical boundaries.
As you said it also applies to Google, and nobody to my knowledge ever claimed that all departments and all people in them a e.v.i.l., not even criticis of all sorts of things Google did and does.
>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.