Google Is Restructuring Under a New Company Called Alphabet 235
Mark Wilson writes: Sundar Pichai is the new CEO of Google as the company undergoes a huge restructuring. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are moving to a new company called Google Alphabet which will serve as an umbrella company for Google and its various projects. Google itself is being, in Page's words, "slimmed down" and the change is quite an extraordinary one. Page quotes the original founders' letter that was written 11 years go. It states that "Google is not a conventional company", and today's announcement makes that perfectly clear. There's a lot to take in...Google Alphabet is, essentially, the new face of Google. Page chose to make the announcement in a blog post that went live after the stock markets closed. This is more than just a rebranding, it is a complete shakeup, the scale of which is almost unprecedented.
Conversations will now go like this: (Score:4, Insightful)
- So, there's this new Alphabet project-
- You mean Google project?
- Yeah. So anyway, this new project...
Tax purposes . . . ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe this change has just a simple purpose in enabling Google to avoid paying taxes . . . ? I mean, in which country will the "Google Letters, A-Z" be incorporated? Ireland? The Cayman Islands . . . ? Will one Google Alphabet subsidiary own other subsidiaries . . . ?
Google could an opaque corporate structure, that would be undecipherable to tax authorities in different countries.
It's called a conglomerate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Unconventional" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prepare Three Envelopes (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a sad joke when it actually represents how formulaic business management has become
Blame predecessor and cronies
Build wall of well-paid sycophants
Receive bonus
Blame organization
Reorganize
Receive bonus
Blame employees
Outsource
Receive bonus
.
.
.
Rinse and Repeat at next company
Re:Alphabet... not Google Alphabet (Score:4, Insightful)
He's obviously trying to get what he thinks is important information modded up by placing it higher within the discussion.
This isn't an unreasonable thing to do. In fact, it's often quite necessary, given how Slashdot's mod system is pretty badly broken. It may not be completely broken, like reddit's, or Hacker News', or Stack Overflow's are, but it's still broken.
When you combine a limited number of mods, each with a limited number of mod points, and the propensity people have for not reading through all of the comments before using those mod points, the comments that appear highest within the discussion tend to get modded up the most.
Excellent comments that just happened to get posted later tend to be totally ignored, with comparatively shitty comments posted earlier getting the mod points first, just because they appear first when reading the comments from the top down.
So some people are inclined to work around this broken mod system by putting their comments up as early as possible within the discussion.
We can't blame them for doing that. What we should blame is the broken mod system that forces such behavior.
Rewriting history (Score:5, Insightful)
I love how, in the blog post, Larry specifically mentions four things that "seemed crazy at the time" that purportedly began at Google. Unfortunately two of them - YouTube and Google Maps - were actually created by others and eventually purchased by Google.
I can't wait for his future declarations regarding how people thought Google was crazy when they first created Waze!
Courts (Score:5, Insightful)
It probably also goes some distance to protecting Google's product development from any threats against its advertising business by cranking regulators.
And courts. This helps to segment Google's advertising business so that if they get slammed by a government for refusing to censor, it's much harder to go after the parent company's assets. It's risk-management for shareholders.
Re:Alphabet... not Google Alphabet (Score:0, Insightful)
Crazy this was actually modded up. I've tried to explain it like five times and each time my own description of the problem remained at 0.
Anyway, other issues that make the moderation work poorly:
1. People use mod points when they read the story, not waiting for most comments to be posted. Thus, the sooner you post, the more likely you are to receive positive moderation. Thus, shit people make up and post immediately is likely to be higher scored than stuff that wasn't posted until later because the author was busy doing research, or just didn't see the story until six hours after it was posted.
2. The "load the next 500 comments" button. Even when moderators take the time to read some lowly-scored posts, they probably don't click that button one or two times first, and so not all of the lowly-scored posts are on the page. This issue is quite bad, so much so that if a story has more than 500 comments, any reply you add is unlikely to be read by anyone other than the person you wrote it in reply to. Even if you reply before there are 500 comments, if your post doesn't immediately score some points, it'll be removed from the page when "load the next 500 comments" comes into effect.
For moderation to work, the system needs to require that mods not choose the posts they are going to moderate, but instead they must be given posts at random, and the system must also ensure that each post gets equal opportunity to be moderated so that the firsts posts don't end up with higher scores simply because they were presented to more moderators. E.g., perhaps allow everyone to moderate, but when doing so, they are presented a random post (with context) and that's what they get to score, and exactly which post is chosen to present to them is whichever post in the discussion so far has been presented to the fewest number of moderators.
Also, I must bitch about the fact that, by default, Slashdot won't notify users of replies to their posts if those replies have a score less than 1. It's quite annoying that I can directly reply to people and yet those people never see my post. If they hate "anonymous coward" so much that they must render it inferior, then why not just remove it completely? If it's going to be an option at all, it should be as usable as a normal account.