Google is now a wholly owned subsidiary of a new company called "Alphabet", to be run by Larry Page and Sergei Brin. Sundar Pichai will be CEO of Google, which will remain focused on its core of web-related products. Alphabet will serve as and umbrella for Google's now quite diverse projects, with a separate CEO for each. By way of example, the announcement cites a Life Sciences group, and a group called Calico which is focused on longevity.
All stock in Google will be converted to Alphabet stock, with the same rights and number of shares.
takyon: The Register, The New York Times, Wired, MarketWatch.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Non Sequor on Tuesday August 11 2015, @12:32AM
The way blue sky labs end up working is that 10-30 years before something becomes successful, one of these labs does extensive conceptual development on it. A few people in the know get excited by the developments, but it never reaches mass market deployment for a variety of reasons. Then it sits in storage.
Later on, either when it can be built out of cheap components or everyone has reached the point where they need this thing but don't realize it yet, some lucky doofus picks up on the opportunity and gets rich. At the same time, a hundred unlucky doofuses try to start similar schemes and ruin their credit ratings in the process.
Generally corporate innovation only comes from new corporations forming around newly developing products, or maintaining old products through small iterative improvements. I don't think that you can change that just by wanting it to be different. To some extent, I think that innovation is subsidized by the fact that failure is compartmentalized. The hundred unlucky doofuses don't ruin the credit rating of a parent company, they just ruin their own lives while everyone else moves on.
You can't really seriously include all 101 doofuses under a single umbrella and expect a happy ending.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday August 11 2015, @01:27PM
Google has been pretty aggressive with killing off services that didn't become popular enough. Not saying you are wrong. But google doesn't let things die off naturally.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Tuesday August 11 2015, @04:39PM
Most of the things they've killed off have been fairly practical iterative extensions of their existing infrastructure.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.