Re:This year’s Founders' Letter
by tdaltonc on Thursday April 28, 2016 @02:46PM
(#11591063)
Even after the birth of Alphabet, Google still has a lot of seeming unrelated parts. Should it have been broken up further? Does it make sense to have YouTube, Google Cloud Platform, and android (but not Fiber or Google Capital) all in the same company? Is there anything other than "profitable" that determines who is in the google-core?
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Re:This year’s Founders' Letter
by nostrademons on Thursday April 28, 2016 @02:56PM
(#11591131)
AFAICT, it really is "profitable". The Google/Alphabet split is really for investors' benefit; the only folks who care about corporate structure are Wall Street and the government, so the corporate structure is such that it pleases Wall Street, which lets the people actually working at Alphabet focus on their respective businesses.
As a small business owner of private businesses, I care about corporate structure! it affects financials and banking and employee organization, as well as private capital infusions. Just saying... I do agree re Alphabet/Google though.
When they first announced it, I thought it was some kind of strange attempt to put products into companies and for Alphabet (ABC) to be a holding company on that. This would have brought more visibility into the truly profitable bits of Google and the parts that are huge money holes.
Instead, it looks like Google already knew this all along and what seems to be happening is that Alphabet seems to have been formed to divest Google of financial drag, breaking out money pits to see if they can more easily be killed or sold off for parts.
I've noticed that in financial news, ABC is still basically just talked about as "Google".
The stock is still GOOG and GOOGL. I think that and popular perception (Google is a household name) is the reason.
Re:This year’s Founders' Letter
by samfisher83 on Thursday April 28, 2016 @03:16PM
(#11591258)
The majority of your profits come from search. If you break it down investor will be clamoring to get rid of most of the other stuff since it doesn't make much money especially when compared to search. Was Sundar a founder?
Re:This year’s Founders' Letter
by strictnein on Thursday April 28, 2016 @04:08PM
(#11591566)
More accurately, the majority of their profits come from advertising. Search is just what draws a lot of the eyeballs.