Will Google's Alphabet Pay Off?

When Google became Alphabet, the rationale seemed simple: that a company of companies can innovate faster than a single large beast. But that's only the start.

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"It’s kind of counterintuitive,” Google co-founder Larry Page remarked a couple of years ago. “Normally in a business, you think about, ‘What’s the adjacent thing that I can do?’ But maybe you can actually do more projects that are less related to each other.”

Back then, Page was explaining why his company—whose mission, officially, is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful—had expanded to address everything from teaching automobiles to drive to researching ways to extend the human life span. At the time, the insight seemed classic Page, a heartfelt defense of unconventional thinking. Today it feels like something more: a premonition of perhaps the most radical, labyrinthine corporate restructuring of the digital era.

Page released a letter last August announcing the reconfiguring of Google into a conglomerate called Alphabet. It described Alphabet as a new holding company that would be composed of independent operating units. The Google search engine and related businesses—including Android, Gmail, and YouTube, to name a few—would be just one of them, and although it wasn’t initially clear, Alphabet would be home to nine other companies, including Calico (the health care company whose goal is to lengthen life expectancy), Verily (the home of the company’s “smart” contact lens), X (its R&D arm), Deep Mind (artificial intelligence), and Access (all of the company’s high-speed Internet initiatives). In February, Alphabet added its 11th unit when it elevated the think tank/tech incubator formerly known as Google Ideas into its own entity called Jigsaw.