Overnight it apparently emerged that Google was going to change its name to Alphabet, or so many sites would have you believe. Well, simply put, that’s a steaming pile of horse manure.
In fact, Google’s CEO Larry Page is setting up a new parent company called Alphabet, which will oversee many other companies – one being Google, and the others being parts of Google that have split off and formed their own separate entities.
According to Page, the parts of Google that Android users know and love, such as Maps, YouTube and the Play store, will all still be Google entities. It’s the parts that consumers never see, such as the research divisions, that are splitting off from the Google family and falling directly under the Alphabet banner instead.
As Page puts it, the ‘newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead’. His reason? To make Google ‘cleaner and more accountable’.
Given the European Union and European Commission’s intense interest in how massive Google has grown in the past decade, fragmentation seems like a perfectly natural and sensible act. Not content with dominating the world of web search (you never hear someone saying they’re gonna ‘bing’ something, do you?), Google is also an enormous figure in mobile, dropping its own OS, apps and services onto the vast majority of new handsets.
Of course, if it’s these two factors that really rubbed sand into the EU and EC’s naughty bits, we’re wondering just how this fragmentation will help to calm matters. After reading Page’s statement, it sounds like the Internet and mobile parts won’t be leaving Google’s branding just yet, but we’d be surprised if Android didn’t split out and become a separate entity.
So, will Android really spread its wings and fly to the Alphabet umbrella, and if so, what impact will that have on us, the Android users? Well, the impact should be minimal. In fact, anyone who uses Android but doesn’t bother to read tech websites (those poor, lost souls) probably won’t notice that anything has changed. And with Page heading up Alphabet, nothing technically will have changed except for some behind-the-scenes red tape.
So calm down, dear. Why not have a biscuit and a bit of a listen to Cardiacs instead? After all, it was them that invented the Alphabet Business Concern in the first place. Or was it the other way round?
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