Google's big news: Sundar Pichai as CEO, and the creation of Alphabet

Google co-founder Larry Page yesterday announced the creation of a new company, Alphabet, to preside over all of Google's current business interests.

He described Alphabet as "mostly a collection of companies," the largest of which will be Google, with Alphabet to be run by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as CEO and president respectively.

The restructuring sees the core Google entity as "a bit slimmed down", as product lines that are "pretty far afield of our main Internet products" will be separated from the Internet business, and be contained in the wider Alphabet instead.

This includes projects such as the glucose-sensing contact lens in its life sciences umbrella and Calico which is focused on longevity.

To lead the slimmer version of Google as CEO is India-born Sundar Pichai, who has long been credited with running Google's innovation pipeline as senior vice president of products.

Wrote Larry Page in this blog post: "Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I’ve been tremendously enjoying our work together."

Page noted that Pichai really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for the Internet businesses, and that is was time for him to be CEO of Google.

"I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations," he added.

The restructuring, which Page wrote was aimed at making the company "cleaner and more accountable", will see him and Brin manage capital allocation across the various business lines, while putting in place separate leadership and financial reporting structures.

"Fundamentally, we believe this (new structure) allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related," he wrote.

"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."

Alphabet will also include the famed X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, the firm's drone delivery effort, as well as focus on investment arms, Ventures and Capital.

Google Inc. will be replaced by Alphabet Inc. as the publicly-traded entity, however the two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.

Image: By Maurizio Pesce from Milan, Italia (Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps, Google) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons