| 1 | Executive Sundar Pichai, shown at the Google I/O 2015 keynote, will be Google's new CEO. |
| 2 | Executive Sundar Pichai, shown at the Google I/O 2015 keynote, will... |
| 3 | Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of products for Google under the old structure, will be CEO of Google, while other Google executives will take on leadership roles in Alphabet. |
| 4 | He's shown at an event in San Francisco in 2013. |
| 5 | Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of products for Google under... |
| 6 | Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of products, will become CEO of Google. |
| 7 | He's shown at a May event at Moscone West. |
| 8 | Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of products, will become CEO... |
| 9 | One of the world's best-known tech companies, with a name no one can forget, just announced a new name for itself that's exceptionally generic. |
| 10 | Google said Monday it will be owned by a new umbrella company, Alphabet. |
| 11 | Alphabet is meant to be a collection of companies, with Google as its largest subsidiary, wrote Larry Page, Google's co-founder, in a blog post. |
| 12 | Popular services and products like Maps, Android and YouTube will still operate under the Google brand, but other divisions like Internet-connected thermostat maker Nest and Ventures, the company's investment arm, will be spun out into their own separate companies under Alphabet. |
| 13 | "Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren't very related," Page's blog post said. |
| 14 | The move won't mean much to the 3.5 billion people around the globe who run Google searches each day. |
| 15 | But it will shake up the tech giant's corporate structure, analysts said, allowing certain divisions like Nest to expand and operate more independently from Google's core business, which is advertising. |
| 16 | "It makes a lot of sense," said Tim Bajarin with Creative Strategies. |
| 17 | "Google has really become many companies, not just a single company." |
| 18 | In a way, Google had become "more like an investment company than a single company with multiple investments," he added. |
| 19 | Both Page and fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin will serve as key leaders in Alphabet. |
| 20 | Page will be Alphabet's CEO and Brin its president. |
| 21 | Google's new CEO will be Sundar Pichai, currently a senior vice president overseeing products. |
| 22 | Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will now be executive chairman of Alphabet. |
| 23 | Ruth Porat, the longtime Wall Street executive who recently joined Google, will be chief financial officer for both Google and Alphabet. |
| 24 | Other former Google divisions that will become separate Alphabet companies include the biotech business Calico; Sidewalk, a business that aims to use technology to improve city infrastructure; and X lab, which oversees futuristic projects like drone delivery. |
| 25 | The Alphabet companies will now have more freedom to make larger acquisitions without having to justify how they relate to Google's core business. |
| 26 | For example, Nest could become more aggressive in expanding its reach in the world of Internet-connected devices without being forced to explain how that relates to the core business strategy of Google, Bajarin said. |
| 27 | The restructuring may also help keep talented employees at Google when they want bigger titles, said Rob Enderle of the advisory services firm Enderle Group. |
| 28 | Some former Google employees have landed in big jobs at other Silicon Valley tech firms. |
| 29 | For example, Marissa Mayer, a former vice president at Google, left the tech giant to become CEO of Yahoo. |
| 30 | "If you want to retain people and not have them go off and do startups, this structure addresses that," Enderle said. |
| 31 | Page said the name Alphabet was chosen because it represents language, an important part of Google search. |
| 32 | It also means "alpha-bet" - "alpha is investment return above benchmark," Page wrote in a blog post. |
| 33 | Alphabet Inc. will replace Google's name as a publicly traded company; its website is https://abc.xyz. |
| 34 | Its stock symbol will remain GOOG and GOOGL on the Nasdaq. |
| 35 | "I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products - the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands," Page wrote. |
| 36 | John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's privacy project director, said the shift won't mean much for average users. |
| 37 | "It's easy as ABC - call us Alphabet, call us Google, it really doesn't matter - they're still the Internet giant; they're still going to be doing what they've been doing," he said. |
| 38 | And whether it's Google or Alphabet, the company will still be grabbing your data. |
| 39 | "Google has services that are useful to people, and many people like them, but often don't understand the price they pay in terms of the personal information they turn over - Google amasses all kinds of digital dossiers about you," Simpson said. |
| 40 | Although most analysts called the name Alphabet "generic," there are some perks to changing the parent company to a different name from Google - albeit one that may be too commonplace to trademark. |
| 41 | Ira Kalb, an assistant professor of clinical marketing at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, said Alphabet is an interesting name because there are 26 letters - and you can also have a slogan that says, "We do everything from A to Z." |
| 42 | Having another name can give corporations more leeway because "when you mess up in one area, if you have a separate corporate name it's not necessarily going to hurt other areas," Kalb said. |
| 43 | Wendy Lee and Greta Kaul are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. |
| 44 | E-mail: wlee@sfchronicle.com, gkaul@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thewendylee, @gretakaul. |
| 45 | Ruth Porat: Chief financial officer of Alphabet and Google Inc. |