So this happened on Friday and I almost missed it entirely: Alphabet is now a real, actual company, and Google is technically its subsidiary. Not the announcement from back in August where Larry Page wrote that slightly odd letter about "making Google better through greater focus," the actual legal completion of it. As of October 2nd, if you own Google stock, you now own Alphabet stock. Same ticker letters, more or less (GOOG and GOOGL carried over), but a different company name sitting on top of your brokerage statement.
I don't know why this got under my skin the way it did. Companies restructure all the time and nobody outside finance Twitter cares. But there's something genuinely weird about waking up one day and the company that runs your email, your maps, your photos, your entire digital life basically, has quietly become a division of some holding company you'd never heard of eight weeks ago. Larry Page is CEO of Alphabet now. Sundar Pichai runs Google. Sergey Brin is president of Alphabet. Nest, Calico, Google X, Fiber, Verily (the health thing, still getting used to that name), all separate now, all siblings instead of departments.
Does any of this change what happens when you type something into a search box? No. Not even a little. That's kind of the point of the whole exercise, actually — Page has said pretty directly that this is about giving the moonshot projects room to fail or succeed without dragging Google's ad numbers into the story every quarter, and about giving the actual search-and-ads business a leaner, more accountable shape now that it's basically the whole company's income. I get the logic. I just think it's funny how invisible it is to literally everyone except shareholders and people like me who apparently find corporate org charts more interesting than they should.
The domain is what got me laughing, honestly. abc.xyz. That's Alphabet's actual web address. Not alphabet.com (which, from what I can tell, they don't own and didn't bother fighting for), just abc.xyz, using a top-level domain that mostly gets used for spam sites and half-finished side projects. For a company obsessed with clean design and good taste in basically every product they ship, abc.xyz reads like a placeholder someone forgot to replace before launch. Maybe that's the joke. Maybe I'm overthinking a URL.
Anyway, separately and much less philosophically: my Nexus 5X preorder from last Tuesday is apparently shipping "within 1-2 weeks," according to the tracking email that showed up this morning. $379 for the 16GB model, which felt like a lot until I remembered what I paid for my last two phones combined. I've been on a Nexus 5 since early 2014 and the battery's gotten bad enough that I'm carrying a charging cable in my bag like it's 2011 again. Fingerprint sensor on the back is the feature I'm actually excited about, more than the camera bump or USB-C, which everyone's been talking about like it's some huge leap. It's a cable. I'll adapt.
I keep going back and forth on whether the Alphabet thing matters to anyone who isn't tracking a stock portfolio. My honest opinion, for what it's worth: it doesn't, not yet, not for a normal person checking Gmail on their lunch break. But structures like this have a way of mattering later, once budgets and priorities start flowing through different channels than they used to. Ask anyone who watched a company go through a restructuring and then quietly kill the product they liked eighteen months later. I'm not predicting doom here. I'm just saying the org chart is rarely as boring as it looks on the day it changes.
Either way, I've got a new phone coming and a slightly different name on my stock app, and one of those two things I actually care about.