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A comment on Alphabet, Walmart join U.S. effort to speed up coronavirus testing. Parent comment

Re:Alphabet, Walmart join U.S. effort to speed up coronaviru... by tathougies on Sunday March 15, 2020 @12:32AM (#22581288)
Verily is an Alphabet subsidiary. To the majority of Americans, 'Alphabet' is Google, because Alphabet is the successor organization to Google the company. All these ridiculous technicalities are nuts. No one cares that Alphabet decided to reorganize to maximize shareholder value. Alphabet is literally Google, and still trades under that ticker (GOOG). When people talk about Google the company, they mean Alphabet, and you know that.

Like, most people on HN talk about how 'Google Fiber' is part of Google, but really it's not, it's part of Alphabet, which owns the trademark Google. Or again, when GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) invests in a company, people say 'Google invested in <blah> company', because GV is alphabet, which is Google because... Google the company means Alphabet in common parlance. Stop nitpicking.

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Re:Alphabet, Walmart join U.S. effort to speed up coronaviru... by umanwizard on Sunday March 15, 2020 @02:25AM (#22581739)
The important part is not google vs alphabet, it’s the fact that their site will only be available for the Bay Area.
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Re:Alphabet, Walmart join U.S. effort to speed up coronaviru... by jpster on Sunday March 15, 2020 @01:49PM (#22585079)
Exactly. For weeks people have been clamoring to get tested, including outside of the Bay Area. But whatever they’re launching will not help provide this in the short-term. That is the point.
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Re:Alphabet, Walmart join U.S. effort to speed up coronaviru... by threeseed on Sunday March 15, 2020 @07:05AM (#22582743)
And that there isn't 1700 people working on it.
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Re:Alphabet, Walmart join U.S. effort to speed up coronaviru... by tathougies on Sunday March 15, 2020 @12:35PM (#22584366)
Good point. The most important part of the speech is the number of engineers working on it. If we have 1699 it might not work but if only we could know we had 1700 then we would all be saved /s.
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Re:Alphabet, Walmart join U.S. effort to speed up coronaviru... by threeseed on Sunday March 15, 2020 @04:50PM (#22586639)
Number of engineers is a sign of the scale and significance of the project.
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Re:Alphabet, Walmart join U.S. effort to speed up coronaviru... by koheripbal on Sunday March 15, 2020 @10:01AM (#22583521)
initially.
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