Writing a new script
On Tuesday, India woke up to the news of Sundar Pichai, an engineer and executive hailing from Chennai who has made it big in Silicon Valley, becoming the CEO of Google. Far bigger in import was the news of the reorganisation of the internet behemoth Google itself, which propelled Mr. Pichai to the top slot. Larry Page, who along with Sergey Brin started the search engine in 1998, announced a corporate structure in which Google will be part of a new umbrella organisation, Alphabet. This organisation will also have a collection of other ventures, many of which are big bets that Google terms ‘moonshots’. This seems a drastic change for one of the most successful companies of the information era, a bellwether technology enterprise, a constant innovator, and one which has billions of people using its products. The company, which started off nearly two decades ago with the seemingly modest ambition of providing an organised gateway to all of the world’s information, proved hugely effective, popular and successful. Starting as a search engine and achieving success in producing a weighted ranking of webpages, it moved on to become a market leader in webmail (Gmail), browsers (Chrome), video hosting (You Tube), news aggregation (Google News) and mobile operating systems (Android), among other products. It has been so successful in its constant ownership of the latest trends in the internet that it has even created a fear of the monopolisation of the space, as a result getting embroiled in anti-trust cases in Europe.
But all that doesn’t explain the change in the corporate structure, one in which Alphabet will incorporate a “slimmed down” Google among a number of other ventures. Why this change? In his post, Mr. Page simply wrote, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” A distinguishing factor for Google all these years has been its capacity and inclination to expand the frontiers of technological innovation into newer ventures beyond its core business. So, while expanding, quite smartly, into adjacent areas of its business, it also ventured into ambitious projects where pay-offs can be expected only many years into the future: cars that are self-driven, balloons that power internet access, technologies that slow down ageing, and so on. Also, remaining true to its start-up roots, Google has been open to experimentation and, therefore, to some failures (Orkut and Google Plus, to name two of them). Sometimes this has led critics and investors to worry that Google was spending too much time, effort and money on such experiments. The reorganisation, led by Alphabet, may not only provide more clarity on these differently mature businesses but also provide the leadership a structure to think like a start-up again and not get drowned in the ‘big-ness’ of the $66-billion Google.
