G is for Google

To be the person who owns alphabet.com right now...

>> small, separate entities makes it easier to tackle new opportunities (which start small) that wouldn't move the needle for Google - as per Christensen.

They would still need to move the needle for alphabet.

Ha -- the Sun planets experience was the first thing that occurred to me as well. In my experience, the planets model was a total, unequivocal failure at Sun -- and the answer to the question of whether those companies could stand on their own was actually "no" for all of them (SME, SMCC and SunSoft all needed one another; the value came from what they delivered together). And Sun customers should blame the planet model for one of the worst decisions in the history of a company that had plenty of contenders for the distinction: unbundling the compilers from the operating system and separately monetizing them. But at least SunSoft, SMCC and SME came to realize that they had shared interests -- in stark contrast to JavaSoft which actually thought it was a separate company (never mind the unending welfare checks from SMI). Sun was a company prone to tribal warfare; as it turns out, dividing the company into tribal homelands did nothing for national unity.

In terms of what's happening here with Google/Alphabet, I imagine that there is some desire to see if some of these companies can make it independently while still being able to make transfer payments to support those that can't. The problem, of course, is that this builds much more explicit resentment from those that are profit-centers towards those that are cost-centers. It will be interesting to see how this works out, but hard to see how this is a stable state; it seems that shareholders will demand that businesses be spun out entirely -- or that the whole thing will have the fate of Google+ and be quietly folded up three years from now...

It seems as though Google (Alphabet) is splitting its business divisions into:

1) Google - a company comprised of reliably profitable products that run at massive scale (search, video, mobile, mail etc), and they know that Sundar Pichai can manage this

2) Everything else - these are high risk ventures with possibly enormous pay-offs. This is a breeding ground for positive black swans which Google are keen to expose themselves too.

To borrow Nassim Taleb's nomenclature, Google is splitting into mediocristan (1) (bounded variance - existing products [like YouTube] are predictably profitable) and extremistan (2) (Calico - if a major breakthrough in combating aging related diseases is made it will be both unpredictable and hugely materially beneficial)

>> We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well.

This sounds like the business restructuring will allow Sergey and Larry to apply just as much capital as they see fit to the extremistani business divisions. In other words they would like to control their exposure to possible consequential rare events in a simple fashion: by controlling a very simple set of parameters - i.e. how much cash each business division gets.

For some reason, people really do like to try the internal market approach. It's not only on IT, companies do that with legal, accounting, any kind of creative sector (like marketing), engineering... I'm yet to see somebody try that with top management - might be a nice experiment.

Internal markets are a really nice and well tested way to gather all the flexibility and agility of a corporate environment, while losing none of the risks, transaction costs and antagonism of a real market. It's a sure way to move your company forward!

But, rants apart, I read the article as Google creating something similar to Lucent Labs, not as separating bureaucratic divisions.