Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google's car project

Re:Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google'... by beamatronic on Monday February 13, 2017 @01:06PM (#13637345)

I just realized the genius of the name "Alphabet".

By investing in this company you are "betting" that they will be able to generate "alpha" ( in the financial sense )

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp

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Re:Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google'... by kyrra on Monday February 13, 2017 @01:18PM (#13637429)

This was called out in the announcement of the company:

We also like that it means alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/google-alphabet.html

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Re:Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google'... by beepboopbeep on Monday February 13, 2017 @01:13PM (#13637396)

...Oh hell, I just thought it was because they had such a big portfolio of endeavors.

Now it just comes across as tacky.

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Re:Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google'... by ggame on Monday February 13, 2017 @01:28PM (#13637510)

I thought it was because Umbrella corp was taken

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Re:Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google'... by sparky_z on Monday February 13, 2017 @01:11PM (#13637381)

Yeah, they said that in the original press release.

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Re:Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google'... by CobrastanJorji on Monday February 13, 2017 @01:28PM (#13637507)

You could also consider Google as Alphabet's primary, or "alpha" bet, but Google is also investing in a variety of "other bets". The name also provides for cool URLs, like https://abc.xyz.

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Re:Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google'... by jogjayr on Monday February 13, 2017 @03:25PM (#13638430)

Serious (and off-topic) question: did Silicon Valley name Hooli XYZ as a nod to that domain name? A whois seems to indicate that the domain was created a year before the second season of the show, when Hooli XYZ made its first appearance.

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Re:Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google'... by kobeya on Monday February 13, 2017 @03:36PM (#13638533)

I'm pretty sure it was just an obvious play on Google X. But googlers are not without a sense of humor.

http://hooli.xyz/

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Re:Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google'... by kobeya on Monday February 13, 2017 @03:35PM (#13638515)

A beta-bet, if you will.

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Re:Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google'... by bbcbasic on Monday February 13, 2017 @02:01PM (#13637770)

Alternatively they could have named themselves "tautology"

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