Reading between the alphabets
What we should actually make of the Google restructure
When you start something that you believe will ‘change the world’, and it literally does, you know you’ve built something big. Really, really big. However, what defines such a company? Is it that one idea? Or an underlying culture that drives it’s host of ideas? That’s the question Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been trying to answer all this while and I think they’ve finally found the answer.
They recently announced the formation of Alphabet, a parent company to oversee Google Inc and all it’s other initiatives as separate business entities. Obviously, this gave way to speculation, extrapolation and so many assumptions. People have dissected this move in every way imaginable, but what is the real story behind the big story? People find the idea of a bigger company owning Google very interesting, and highly unlikely to happen, but it did. From a marketing standpoint, what’s even more impressive is the fact that this idea arrived with such simplicity and genius. Rather than go with the whole shebang of rebranding, excessive promotion and constant ‘buzz’ through PR articles, they simply explained it on a 3 min letter on a webpage, leaving everything else to the imagination of the media and anyone who’s interested. That’s the power of an idea, which inherently drives what we call the ‘brand’.
So what is this idea? Newsflash, it’s nothing brand new or out of the world making you vomit rainbows. Instead it’s one of the most fundamental traits of human nature, the drive to explore and innovate. As stated rather eloquently in the beginning of the letter, the founders, and thus, Google always believed in placing bets in the strange, utopian, breakthrough ideas, otherwise popularly called ‘moonshots’ to make the actual difference it set out to make.
Now the question is why the need of a separate entity to make this possible, Google has been testing self driving cars, motion gesture technology, virtual reality glasses, internet via hot air balloons and so much more all these years, so why ‘Alphabet’?
Two reasons; Firstly, because moonshot ideas need money. In the middle of all those late night, caffeine-driven discussions to change the world, there is one guy thinking who’s gonna pay for all this, and the person who can pay, is thinking ‘why, if i should at all, pay for all this?’ Forming a separate entity gives them flexibility financially to raise funds from new investors, without redirecting funds from Google’s massive search advertising revenue. Which is a major concern for stakeholders.
Secondly, Google the brand, is based on it’s core offering i.e search, which has also helped build strong properties like Android, Youtube, Maps, among a few, and these moonshot ideas drift further away from that. This, in turn creates a convoluted brand idea which is never recommended. Alphabet gives these ideas the freedom to stay away from Google and create(or even fail) in their own spaces, which is equally crucial for an idea to develop into something lasting (read the Flickr debacle with Yahoo)
So, in essence, Alphabet is simply a vessel to hold and boost some disruptive business concepts of the 21st century. Considering the founders of Google wanted this bad enough to separate it from their prized pet project, they won’t just let it turn into a half filled idea on a notepad or word document.
