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Google Businesses

Alphabet Wraps Up Reorganization With a New Company Called XXVI (bloomberg.com) 103

Posted by BeauHD from the roman-numerals dept.
Alphabet is approaching its final form. After evolving from Google into a corporate parent with distinct arms in far-flung fields like health care and self-driving cars, it is now forming a new holding company called XXVI Holdings Inc. Bloomberg reports: The new structure legally separates Google from other units such as Waymo, its self-driving car business, and Verily, a medical device and health data firm. Google co-founder Larry Page announced Alphabet two years ago to foster new businesses that operate independently from Google. Technically, however, those units, called the "Other Bets," were still subsidiaries of Google. The new structure, unveiled Friday, enables the Other Bets to become subsidiaries of Alphabet on the same legal footing as Google. "We're updating our corporate structure to implement the changes we announced with the creation of Alphabet in 2015," Gina Weakley Johnson, an Alphabet spokeswoman, said. She called the process a legal formality that won't affect ultimate shareholder control, operations, management or personnel at the 75,606 person company. Google is also changing from a corporation to a limited liability company, or LLC. This won't alter the way the business pays taxes, Johnson said. The switch is partly related to Google's transformation from a listed public company into a business owned by a holding company. Now, it's owned by Alphabet, so it effectively has only one investor and no public disclosure obligations. An LLC structure is better suited to this situation. XXVI, the name of the new holding entity, is the number of letters in the alphabet expressed in Roman numerals.
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Alphabet Wraps Up Reorganization With a New Company Called XXVI More

Alphabet Wraps Up Reorganization With a New Company Called XXVI

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  • Thanks for clarifying (Score:3)

    by El Cubano ( 631386 ) on Friday September 01, 2017 @08:07PM (#55126967)

    XXVI, the name of the new holding entity, is the number of letters in the alphabet expressed in Roman numerals.

    Thanks for clarifying that. At first I thought they named themselves for Taylor Switft's age. The number of letters in the alphabet is much better. Of course, it is a good thing that Google wasn't started in China, or the new company would have ended up with a name like MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No it's some kind hipster/chromosome disorder you are required to have for their diversity quota.

    • XXVI, the name of the new holding entity, is the number of letters in the alphabet expressed in Roman numerals.

      Thanks for clarifying that. At first I thought they named themselves for Taylor Switft's age. The number of letters in the alphabet is much better. Of course, it is a good thing that Google wasn't started in China, or the new company would have ended up with a name like MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

      I wonder if this is an assumption on the part of the article writer. XXVI is clearly a stock-symbol-shortened version of ".xX VI Xx.". The new company name is just a strong suggestion to employees as to what editor they should use. Hopefully this means we will have VI bindings in Android soon.

  • Romans used just 23 letters in Latin (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Or so Google tells me.

  • This is what happens (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    When you have too much money and too many employees.

    Meaningless wankery.

    • I disagree. It's very meaningful. What it means is Google doesn't have to be as transparent since it has only one stockholder.

      • This was my first thought as well...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tattood ( 855883 )

          This was my first thought as well...

          As long as anybody can buy Google stock on the open market, they are a public company. They still have many, many individual stock holders, but XXVI is the majority stock holder. If XXVI bought up all of the stock, only then can they be as non-transparent as they want.

    • > When you have too much money and too many employees.

      Yes, they had too many employees in too many completely different lines of business, all under one awkwardly large company.

      > Meaningless wankery.

      Now they are splitting different subsidiaries that do different things, like Waymo, into distinctly separate companies. Each company will have fewer employees, and be more focused. That's not meaningless.

  • And we can finally get the Sixth World started properly with megacorps and a dystopian cyberpunk economy-stratified society.

    • And we can finally get the Sixth World started properly with megacorps and a dystopian cyberpunk economy-stratified society.

      Since they're putting all these different entities under one name, I'm shocked they didn't simply drop all the pretense and name it:

      Umbrella(TM) Corp.

      An umbrella by any other name...?

      Strat

  • Google used to be more ambitious.

    From googol (100 zeros) and indexing all the worlds information, reduced to ABCs and counting like Sesame Street.

    If they were still cool, it would be XLII, the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity's most important innovations"

      Google = information
      Alphabet = Language

  • So XXVI is the employee age limit? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01, 2017 @08:40PM (#55127073)

    Nobody over 26 yrs old will be hired, just like the parent company?

  • Google and the "Other Bets" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So, if these other units were the "Other Bets" (in the sense of wagers/gambles, I presume), and Google itself was the first of the bets, that means that it was the "Alpha Bet". :-)

  • why (Score:3)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Friday September 01, 2017 @09:29PM (#55127219) Homepage Journal
    So what is the purpose of this expenditure of presumably vast amounts of money to set up shell companies that legally separate individuals from activities while still allowing the individuals to exert full control? Is it just a tax shelter? Is it to limit legal liability when one of these firms does something hugely illegal? Corporate does not spend money without a reason.
    • It sure does sound like they are preparing to be evil.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hord ( 5016115 )

      “By separating them, it allows the parent company to limit the exposure of the various obligations of the LLCs,” Hobart said. “For example, if one of the LLCs has its own debt, only that LLC will end up being responsible for payment of that debt.”

      This. Google's ad business doesn't want to have to pay for the failures in all their experiments. The ad business is the only one that consistently makes large amounts of money and they are going to do everything they can to isolate it leg

      • The ad business is the only one that consistently makes large amounts of money

        Actually, there are several businesses that consistently make large amounts of money. Ad revenue still comprises almost 90% of revenue, but it's ticking downward year by year. Enterprise licensing (GSuite, mostly) is doing very well and growing. Android also consistently generates billions through the Play store. I think Google's cloud services are generating pretty good revenues, too, though they may not generate any net profits.

        However, it is true that all of the things that make money are part of Googl

        • Ad revenue still comprises almost 90% of revenue, but it's ticking downward year by year.

          In case it's not obvious, I mean ad revenues are declining as a percentage of total revenues, not in absolute terms. Said another way, ad revenues are growing at a healthy rate, but non-ad revenues are growing faster.

    • Re:why (Score:5, Interesting)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Saturday September 02, 2017 @06:49AM (#55128077) Journal

      Most of the purpose of having a corporation is to ensure that if it goes bankrupt it doesn't take the owners down with it. While it's unlikely that any of the "other bets" could generate such a large financial liability that it could actually sink Google, they might be able to put a dent in it. By separating the companies entirely, Alphabet enables any one of the subsidiaries to go belly up without harming the rest. Of course, they'll still have the option of using cash generated by Google to bail out failing subsidiaries if they want. Or to grow succeeding subsidiaries. Larry and Sergey being who they are, I doubt they'd use bankruptcy to avoid legitimate liability, but the change should serve to make shareholders a lot more comfortable with the other bets, knowing that any of them can be shut down cleanly at any time.

      Is it to limit legal liability when one of these firms does something hugely illegal?

      I don't think that actually works. When courts are pursuing criminal wrongdoing, they look for actual decisionmakers, regardless of corporate boundaries. Otherwise it would be trivial for corporations to deliberately set out to do illegal things, isolating the illegal acts in a subsidiary set up for that purpose, then just cutting it loose if it gets caught. For example, VW could have set up a subsidiary responsible for writing the emissions control software for their diesel vehicles.

      • I think the difference you might be thinking of is Criminal VS Civil. If through your own negligence you're found CRIMINALLY responsible for something, then LLC isn't going to probably do much for you. If someone feels like suing you CIVILLY for say money they feel you own them, well I think that might be where the whole LLC comes into play.

        I remember a lawyer trying to explain that simply putting a waiver doesn't exempt you from laws, you are still subject to them. It might help a bit, should there be at l

        • I understand the difference between criminal prosecution and torts. I don't think the corporate structure is an effective shield against either, otherwise we'd see a lot more corporations setting up subsidiaries to shield them from risky actions. e.g. (again) the VW case, which actually includes both criminal and civil liability.

    • Previously, Alphabet had a division that builds self-driving cars, called Waymo, another division that makes smart thermostats, another that makes Android, etc. Dozens of unrelated product lines. It's awkward and difficult to manage so many different projects as one company. What reason is there to keep them all together as divisions of the company? It just makes sense for these separate products, in different industries, so be separate companies. The new holding company allows them to be separate comp

  • In the future it will just be called... (Score:4, Funny)

    by anvilmark ( 259376 ) on Friday September 01, 2017 @09:46PM (#55127261)

    "The Umbrella Corporation"

  • Transparent ploy to insulate lawsuits (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01, 2017 @10:30PM (#55127373)

    Like if the self driving car part gets a 100bn wrongful death lawsuit it won't take Google down with it.

  • I still think of Alphabet as the Umbrella Corporation.

  • If you pop the name "google" into a numerology calculator [phuture.me] you get a very interesting set of results.
    In western name numerology the vowels and consonants are summed to give 2 "hidden" traits of "Inner Dreams" & "Souls Urge"
    Google is unique, as far as I know, in being the only word to give 8 for both of these hidden traits.
    The 3rd trait is the "expression", or how someone/thing appears to the world and is the sum of all letters. Google = 7.
    The number 7 is the number of research (search), study, introspect

    • I'm now certain that whoever comes up with names at that company has a side interest in numerology.

      Technically, you're right of course. But this has more to do with how marketing is taught in US business schools.

      The idea is that a company should hire a consulting company and pay them millions of dollars to check all the possible meanings of a name and its symbols in all the countries the company will want to operate in.

      And please don't get me wrong, this isn't really bad advice in itself. Foreigners can be super arrogant in thinking that a name that sounds good to them will also sound equally good to ev

  • If they take their name after a roman numeral, XXVI, one cannot help wondering what happened to XXV? And XXIV etc?

    Attempted reorganizations gone wrong?

    Secret entities?

  • How does "the new structure eliminates Google's disclosure requirements"

    ultimately square with

    "Don't be evil" ...again, precisely?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You don't get to pick and chose the rules you operate under. While I doubt anyone at Google cries themselves to sleep because of the elimination of the disclosure requirements getting eliminated, the purpose is probably mainly to shield people and property from potential liabilities stemming from other parts of the corporation.

      For instance, as someone else pointed out, this means that if you get bumped by one of Waymo's cars, a jury can't get bamboozled into giving you all of Google's money as compensation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

      If you have your face bashed in with a brick, you'll feel a lot better, and so will we. Also, you won't care about stupid shit anymore. And your inability to talk will make you seem infinitely smarter. All-in-all, it's a big win.

  • XXVI = 26
    Half of which is notably 13, which is just a little evil.
    26 then presumably represents double evil or nearly complete evil.
    So we arrive at 2*X + 6 = 26
    Dividing by two X + 6 = 13
    So Something + 6 is Evil
    And twice something + 6 is double evil...
    From there we can extrapolate that 3 of something is complete evil
    Going back to XXVI=26 , we see on the right are 2 XX and VI which is 6 and on the left 2 and 6, so we swap and reevaluate with X = 6 and 2 = X
    66VI=XX6
    666=666
    Thus google is complete EVIL.

  • It was nice of them to have a distinct action and period in time where they decided to turn evil.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

      What is it with fuck-wits and "don't be evil"? You really need to let that go. Or drown yourself in ketchup. That would be both liberating and amusing.

      • Naw, the "don't be evil" motto was a good thing.

        It was kind of a bad sign when they tried to distance themselves from it back in 2012ish. But I didn't think they were abusing their power much and it was really just a clash of corporate vs engineering cultures.

        But the switch from Google to Alphabet is the culmination of that corporate culture winning out. Google might still be run by engineers, but Alphabet is pulling the strings. Probably just for tax shenanigan schemes, but it's a pretty clear sign. I tho

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