Everybody and their cousin wrote about Alphabet back in August, when Larry Page dropped that blog post announcing Google was restructuring itself into a holding company. I remember reading it on my phone in a parking lot and thinking, okay, sure, fine, corporate paperwork. What I didn't clock until poking around this week is that the actual legal completion of that reorg happened today. Not announced today. Completed today. Google Inc, as a ticker, is basically done. If you own shares, you now technically own Alphabet Inc, and Google itself becomes one subsidiary sitting underneath it alongside Nest, Calico, Google Ventures, Google Capital, and whatever else got folded into the "Other Bets" bucket.
I think this is actually the more interesting date than August 10th was, and almost nobody's going to write about it, because "the paperwork finished" isn't a headline. But it's the part that matters if you're the kind of person who reads 10-Qs for fun (I am not, but I know people who are, and they were practically giddy about this).
Here's the thing that got me: starting with earnings reports going forward, Google is going to have to disclose how much money the "Other Bets" segment is losing. Not vague hand-waving about "long-term investments," actual numbers. Fiber, Nest, the life sciences stuff, Google X and its self-driving cars and balloon internet, all of that gets its own line that isn't just quietly absorbed into search ad revenue anymore. Sundar Pichai runs Google-the-subsidiary now (search, ads, YouTube, Android, Maps, the stuff that pays for everything), and Larry Page and Sergey Brin sit up at the Alphabet level being visionary about balloons and life extension, presumably. I kinda respect the honesty of it, actually. Ad money funds the science fiction, and now we get receipts.
My personal opinion, and I'll die on this hill: this was mostly a move to stop investors from freaking out every quarter about how much cash Google X burns through. Wall Street hates not knowing what it's paying for. Separating the businesses on paper means Google's core numbers look cleaner and the weird moonshot spending gets its own box that people can either be excited about or ignore. It's less "we're becoming a new kind of company" and more "we got tired of explaining ourselves on earnings calls." Which, fair. I'd get tired of that too.
Unrelated but adjacent, because it happened the same week and I haven't mentioned it yet: Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P preorders went live on the Google Store last Tuesday, the 29th. LG built the 5X, Huawei built the 6P, and this is the first time Huawei's made a Nexus phone, which feels like a bigger deal than it's getting credit for. $379 for the 5X, $499 for the 6P at the base storage tier, both running Marshmallow out of the box, both with USB-C, which meant I had to go dig through a drawer of cables I already own and realize none of them fit. That's a me problem, not a Google problem, but it's the first time in years a phone launch made me actually go buy a new cable before the phone even shipped.
Anyway. Back to the corporate stuff for a second, because it's the actual news of the day even if it doesn't feel like it. The Alphabet ticker situation is a little confusing if you're not paying attention — GOOGL and GOOG both still exist, they just point at Alphabet now instead of Google. If you're the sort of person who has a few shares sitting in some brokerage account you forgot about (no judgment, I have one of these accounts, it's embarrassing), don't panic when the name on your statement changes. You didn't get scammed. Google just moved into a bigger building and put a different name on the lobby directory.
I don't have a tidy way to close this one out. It's a structural change that mostly matters to people who read financial filings, dressed up in a name that sounds like a Greek fraternity. Ask me again in a year whether it actually changed anything about how Google operates day to day, because right now, from where I'm sitting, Search still works exactly the same as it did yesterday.