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".