Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort<a href="http://www.hooli.xyz/" target="_blank" class="hidden-link">.</a>
One thing I've heard is that this would help them in terms of taxes, allowing them to write off projects that don't make money, although I'm not entirely clear on how Alphabet would accomplish this.
That would be no joke if that was a reason to do it.
The first thing I thought of involved the regulations and other troubles that Google was facing in the EU. Those troubles seemed to summarize as "Google is too big and is taking advantage of its large market share". Alphabet looks like it'll fracture the google businesses more, which might help reduce the issues they're facing in the EU.
Well, Google is already quite fractured in the EU - it has something like 20 subsidiaries, one in most EU countries[0] ?
That is also a common (mandatory?) setup, for multinational companies to have a local subsidiary in every country where they operate. I guess institutions like the EU must be handle that and focus on the activity independently of the fine details of the company structure, so that the restructuring would not really help or hinder.
>> The first thing I thought of involved the regulations and other troubles that Google was facing in the EU. Those troubles seemed to summarize as "Google is too big and is taking advantage of its large market share". Alphabet looks like it'll fracture the google businesses more, which might help reduce the issues they're facing in the EU.
> Well, Google is already quite fractured in the EU - it has something like 20 subsidiaries, one in most EU countries
Seperation at the marketing end for ad services, or for purposes of tax optimisation, does not really alleviate any of the antitrust concerns. It's the services that matter. Google's main ad business and search being in the same company for example.
So the current EU subsidiaries would not have an effect on the EU investigation, but this current plan might.
IANAL, but it seems unlikely. The Alphabet move doesn't appear to be splitting out the components the EU regulators appear to care about (search, ads, maps) from each other. If regulators are concerned about the effects of personal information consolidation, that's not changing.
Alphabet is only missing a startup accelerator, why wouldn't Sergey and Larry now focus on earlier stage themselves? All those ambitious things can be achieved better by a lot of startupa competing in parallel.
Yaa, $1 for a domain like hooli.xyz or Google, I mean Alphabet ( https://abc.xyz ). I'll try it out.
Just snapped up prefi.xyz, suffi.xyz, picka.xyz, icebo.xyz, equino.xyz, mailbo.xyz, postbo.xyz, rolode.xyz, soapbo.xyz, toolbo.xyz, lunchbo.xyz, letterbo.xyz, chatterbo.xyz for about $15 total for all of them.
I skipped on conve.xyz, laryn.xyz, proli.xyz, and surta.xyz, which were all open a few minutes ago.
Thankfully the proliferation of gTLDs is increasing the supply and lowering the value for squatters like you. You screwed up in 1996, and you're screwing up again now, but hey, it's your money.
The rich boys are speculating on everything. I don't see anything wrong with poor boys taking a chance on an domain name? Yes--I don't like squatting, but when you have huge companies buying up huge blocks of names; I actually encourage the little guy to buy a few, and hope?
The rich boys always seem to get the best names first?
(I do wish when domains expired, the domain company wouldn't have first shot at buying the expired domain? Why are they allowed to do this? It doesn't seem fair? Maybe, I got the protocol wrong?)
Hooli XYZ is a reference to the HBO show Silicon Valley. It has no relation to Google (other than that Hooli is basically a fictional parody of Google). Looks like some developer added that to this press release as an easter egg.
I feel Google shouldn't stop trying to pretend they are still cool hype startup, that just come up as fake. I also feel from a PR perspective it might in fact hurt their image.
I like when random people try to pretend that they've defined cool, who has it, and what constraints it puts on their behavior.
EDIT: hartator disingenuously changed the content of his comment to be more measured. The original comment was "I like when Google tries to pretend they're still cool".
Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort<a href="http://www.hooli.xyz/" target="_blank" class="hidden-link">.</a>