Alphabet, Inc.

Alphabet Inc. is an American technology conglomerate and holding company formed in 2015 as a strategic restructuring of Google and its various subsidiaries. Commonly referred to as Google’s parent company, Alphabet was created to implement Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s strategic goal of continuous technological innovation across multiple industries and sectors, including health care, entertainment, transportation, venture capital financing, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The semiautonomous structure aims to allow company segments to pursue new opportunities with the support of shared resources and cooperation.

Business segments

Alphabet’s subsidiaries are generally separated into three major segments: Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets. Google Services has been the largest of the three. In 2022, it generated 92% of Alphabet’s annual revenue, while Google Cloud and Other Bets contributed 7% and 1%, respectively.

• Google Services includes its core search and advertising business, plus Android, Chrome, Google Maps, Google Play, YouTube, and Bard (a generative artificial intelligence chatbot).
• Google Cloud comprises Alphabet’s suite of enterprise-level cloud computing solutions geared toward businesses and governments.
• Other Bets houses Alphabet’s emerging-stage businesses like Waymo (self-driving cars), Calico Life Sciences (biotech research), Nest (smart-home devices), CapitalG (private equity fund), and DeepMind (AI research), among many others.

Each segment is made up of autonomous teams, many of which are headed by their own CEOs and executive leadership. This structure lets each subsidiary operate like an emerging company—much faster than a larger and often slower enterprise, but with the resources of a mature corporation.

The strategy behind Alphabet’s segmentation

In addition to organizing its various initiatives, Alphabet’s segmentation provides a number of key advantages:

• Risk management. By separating each subsidiary’s operational structure and brand identity, Alphabet can pursue riskier ventures while shielding each subsidiary and its core brand from reputational risk in the event of controversy or failure.
• Business transparency. Alphabet’s business segmentation made it easier for investors and analysts to evaluate the financial results of the company’s various ventures. For example, investors can clearly distinguish its search and advertising segment’s performance from those of its YouTube, enterprise cloud, and self-driving cars segments. Alphabet reports its revenue and earnings on a consolidated basis, but it also provides a separate breakdown of financial results for its various subsidiaries, making it easier for people to track the progress of Alphabet’s distinct ventures.
• Product and service diversification. By providing a variety of products and services across a wide range of market sectors, Alphabet can effectively diversify its exposure to the different phases of the economic cycle. When one sector experiences a reduction in demand, Alphabet’s revenues in other high-demand sectors may compensate for the reduced revenue.
• Innovative disruption. By consistently venturing into emerging technologies and industries through a combination of new business acquisitions and ongoing research and development, Alphabet ensures its position at the forefront of technological advances, avoiding the stigma of stagnation that often accompanies maturing companies.
• Focus. By operating with a more autonomous leadership structure, Alphabet’s subsidiaries can focus on their specific missions with greater efficiency and fewer “top-down” operational constraints and other comparable bureaucratic bottlenecks typical of larger corporations. Meanwhile, Google’s core segments can continue to focus on their legacy services and primary revenue drivers.

Overall, the creation of Alphabet was a strategic move to allow Google and its various other ventures to operate in their respective domains effectively and simultaneously with greater transparency, maximum efficiency, and minimal risk exposure.

The birth of Google’s “parent” company

On August 10, 2015, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they were creating the new holding company, Alphabet Inc. A move partly inspired by Warren Buffett’s investment holding company Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), the creation of a holding company would restructure Google and its various other businesses as subsidiaries of Alphabet Inc., now the parent company. This allowed the various departments that weren’t directly related to Google’s main Internet services to spin off into their own subcompanies within the same business umbrella.

Sundar Pichai, who was originally Google’s product chief, was named Google’s new CEO, while Brin and Page managed Alphabet as its president and CEO, respectively. Alphabet’s founding was finalized on October 2, 2015.

Building a multisector technology empire

In 2019, when Page and Brin stepped down from their positions at Alphabet, Pichai—already Google’s CEO—assumed the position of CEO for Alphabet. As a strong proponent of a mobile-first approach, Pichai played a pivotal role in the success of the Android operating system and the proliferation of its large-scale ecosystem.

Pichai also strongly advocated Alphabet’s artificial intelligence initiatives, enabling the company to pursue developments that would lead to breakthroughs in voice recognition, image processing, self-driving vehicles (Waymo), and Google’s generative AI chatbot Bard.

Pichai’s tenure (beginning in 2015) oversaw numerous initiatives, product launches, and product overhauls, including:

• 2016: Pixel smartphone. Google’s line of smartphones features advanced camera capabilities and integration capacity with Google software and services.
• 2016: Google Nest (originally Google Home). This rebranded segment includes all of Google’s smart home devices, including routers, thermostats, security systems, and smart speakers.
• 2016: Google Workspace. Originally G Suite, this set of productivity apps traces its roots back to 2006, when the company launched Google Apps. Google Workspace is an integrated suite of cloud, productivity, and collaboration tools that draw on various Google applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar.
• 2017: Google Meet. This video conferencing platform, originally launched in 2017, rose in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic—along with competitors, such as Zoom Video Communications (ZM) and Slack from Salesforce (CRM).
• 2019: Wing Aviation for drone delivery. Although the company had been working on Wing since 2014, in April 2019, Alphabet’s drone delivery service—which aims to revolutionize package delivery—became the first of its kind to gain approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
• 2019: Google Cloud Anthos. This enterprise-grade platform is designed to manage applications and services across various cloud environments.
• 2023: Bard. Initially unveiled to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bard is Alphabet’s conversational AI chatbot developed for creative content generation.
• 2023: Google Gemini. Gemini is Google’s most advanced and versatile AI model. Unlike Bard, an older model whose applications are generally limited to language and code creation, Gemini is capable of operating in a “multimodal” capacity across different information formats: text, code, audio, image, and video.

Since 2015, Alphabet has acquired more than 160 companies, but as of 2024, Google’s legacy services—including Search, YouTube, and Android—remain the company’s primary revenue drivers. With Google’s legacy products serving as Alphabet’s primary anchor, the company’s various subsidiaries have some financial breathing room to experiment, produce, and aim to flourish in their respective domains at a pace appropriate to each technological venture.