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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: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday December 08 2016, @08:04PM
Not until we achieve dramatic negative population growth it's not. Until then any increase in the average human lifespan translates directly to faster population growth, and we're already well beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet.
Or alternately, any significantly expensive/inaccessible longevity enhancements translate to even greater wealth and power concentration among the elite who will take even longer to die and let the next generation take over.
Longevity is one of those things that sounds nice in isolation, but makes severe existing problems even worse.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday December 08 2016, @09:20PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:15PM
Give it a few months and Trump is going to press the Big Red Button.