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Dave Smith at Business Insider argues that the transformation of Google into Alphabet Inc. has been a public relations boon for the company:
Last August, Google announced it would change its name to Alphabet, which would effectively be a holding company for Google and its various businesses — YouTube, Android, etc. — as well as Google's more outlandish experiments, like its moonshots factory, "X"; its investment arms; and more.
The reasons Google provided mainly had to do with clarity for investors. By creating two specific segments of Google, investors and shareholders could separate the strengths of Google — namely, search and ads — from its riskier endeavors, like self-driving cars. Another reason: Larry Page, then Google's CEO, wanted to take a backseat in operations in order to focus on his bigger dreams, like the company's moonshots in health and energy. That's all well and good for Page, Sergey Brin, and the various executives at Google and Alphabet. But one year later, if you ask a random person on the street if they know what Alphabet is, they likely wouldn't know.
[...] While changing the name from Google to Alphabet and reorganizing Google's various properties under Alphabet doesn't change the past, it does help prevent [...] public relations debacles from happening in the future. Since it's technically Google's parent company currently working on all of its projects that might be considered "creepy" — like drones, self-driving cars, genetic engineering, machine intelligence, or its project to extend the human life span — the name Google is kept out of people's mouths and out of the media, to some degree.
Do modular evil!
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday December 08 2016, @03:30AM
I have serious issues with that as well as the rate at which new products that are essentially the same as the older version are released. It gets very hard to figure out if something I'm looking to buy is worth buying. Sometimes, the warts in a product only become obvious months or even years later, at which point the product is no longer being sold or is close to the end of the production run.
Software from a company like Alphabet is even worse as they're constantly releasing, revising and culling to the point where it's very hard to know if they're even going to still offer the software in 6 months.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by quintessence on Thursday December 08 2016, @04:55AM
Caveat emptor?
It has been interesting to watch the rise of a behemoth like Google (err, Alphabet) within my lifetime.
From scrappy startup that people lauded (especially since they were the underdog for a while) to being a model of responsible corporatehood with their "do no evil" branding to idiots likely to go broke any day now spending extravagantly on stupid things like Youtube to savior offering freedom for poor services with Gmail to starting to have some misgivings about privacy with the release of Chrome to...
At any step of the way, people could have walked away. There were alternatives.
And now we have this entity that no one seems able to escape, that are synonymous with infrastructure. That's embedded.
I still have a copy of Nero 5.5 that I use (admittedly for not much longer as the drives crap out). Yeah, it's not cutting edge, but it works faithfully. Do you really want much more than that?
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday December 08 2016, @05:59AM
it is worse than that: I have two youtube accounts: and they behave very differently.
It is like they are deliberately making it hard to set up an account bot or something.
However, It has the effect that I can not customize the behaviour the way I like it.
I have heard A-B testing is common as well in the web software world.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Sunday December 11 2016, @06:40AM
Apparently I had not linked the new Youtube account to Google+
(Score: 1, Funny) by aristarchus on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:23AM
it's very hard to know
Yes, Francis, it is very hard. Do you want to know how truly hard it is? Do you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @08:42PM
And with this kind of witty repartee, you wonder why everybody is modding you down.
I'll have to let your mother know next time I fuck her.