All this reorganization happened after Ruth Porat took over as Google's new CFO. Prior to that, activities of the bread and butter money-making parts and more speculative parts of Google were not separated. This made investors nervous because while they viewed Google as a money factory, they also viewed it as run by crazy geniuses who might be wasting untold amounts of money on their fun research projects.

It seems Porat felt that Google would be in a better position by separating all that out so that things are more transparent to investors. If the stock price is any indication of how investors felt about that, she was right.

This doesn't mean that the Google brand couldn't still be applied to Waymo's activities, as is the case with Google Fiber, which kept the name. But it is not just Waymo that lost the Google brand in the process: Google X became just X, and Google Life Sciences became Verily.