CALIFORNIA: Google is dead. Long live Alphabet. The tech company announced on August 10 that it would rebrand itself as Alphabet – a new holding company whose largest wholly owned subsidiary will be Google. In a surprise blogpost made public after the stock markets closed, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders, announced a radical shake-up of the company’s corporate structure and management. The new company, Alphabet, will preside over a collection of companies, the largest of which will be Google. Even the site’s new address eschewed convention: https://abc.xyz/

“As Sergey Brin, co-founder and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, ‘Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one’,” wrote Page. “As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make ‘smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses’. From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.”The major restructuring will ostensibly give investors greater insight into how the money is being spent. Colin Gillis, technology analyst at BGC Partners, said the move would allow investors to assess Google’s core business more clearly while allowing Google to highlight its other assets. “It’ll give people a truer picture of the nature and specifics of Google’s core operation,” he said.

He also praised Google’s appointment of Pichai. “My sense is that here’s someone in high demand and in one fell swoop Google have kept him as a key manager,” he said.

All shares of Google will automatically convert into corresponding shares of Alphabet, which will continue to trade under the stock ticker symbols GOOG and GOOGL. The new structure is said to be similar to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which wholly owns a number of diverse holdings and has stakes in several others.

Page will become Alphabet’s CEO. Brin will be its president, and Eric Schmidt will be the executive chairman of Alphabet.