In one of the smoothest and quickest mergers ever, the $ 66 billion, Mountain View, California search giant Google became one of the wholly-owned subsidiaries of Alphabet Inc. by the end of a longish blog by the CEO Larry Page.
The merger paves the way for the world’s largest search company to delve into multiple other ventures it is involved in―Life Sciences (that works on glucose-sensing contact lens), Calico (longevity). It will also allow a greater focus on X Labs that is looking into Wing, the drone delivery project.
Larry Page’s blog explains it quite succintly: “Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related. Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well.”
As a result, Alphabet will replace Google as the publicly traded company. Basically, the move is a means to do interesting things that could create an impact in the future. Google’s self-driving cars is one such project. Depending on how it takes off, it could change the automobile industry globally. The same applies to Project Loon that proposes to provide high speed internet connectivity globally using baloons. The adavntage is the balloons can be moved to different locations in case of an emergency.
But, despite the smoothness with which it was executed in typical Google style, there are still a few rough edges. For starters, the internet giant does not own Alphabet.com, which is owned by BMW. As a result, Alphabet has a complex but interesting address http://abc.xyz. Google also does not own the Twitter handle @alphabet, which is with Cleveland, Ohio-based Chris Andrikanich who acquired it way back in 2007.
The bet that Larry Page and Sergey Brin took on Alphabet seems to be working at least for now with the Google stock up 6% adding many more billions to it stratosperic valuation.