GOOGLE RESTRUCTURES ITSELF, WITH A NEW NAME

Alphabet wants to be a GE for the digital age

Google, coming to grips with its giant size and the splintered nature of its many businesses, is remaking its corporate structure and changing its name to Alphabet.

The name Google isn’t going away: its main search business will still be called Google, as a subsidiary of Alphabet. But several other businesses, such as Fiber, Nest and investing arms such as Google Ventures, will report to Alphabet as well.

Founded as one of many search engines competing for attention in 1998, Google quickly emerged on top. It’s used its abundant advertising revenues to finance a mind-boggling array of projects, from self-driving cars, to insulin-pumping contact lenses, to balloons that distribute Internet signals, to the famous Google Glass, and much more.

Google, one of the best- known brands on the planet, on Monday radically restructured itself under the corporate name Alphabet, an almost unprecedented shift that reflects the company’s far- reaching ambitions and the vast Web it helped evolve.

The move represents Google’s biggest push yet to transcend its roots in the simple but highly profitable business of Web search and turn the company into a multifaceted General Electric for the digital age.

In the new organization, Google’s core business, which handles two out of every three Web searches worldwide, will be a single division that will also include video giant YouTube and smartphone system Android, as well as maps, ads and apps.

Other businesses in the $444 billion empire will be separate divisions under the everything-company Alphabet, investing in anti-aging research (Calico), the Internet of Things (Nest’s “smart” home thermostats), delivery drones (Project Wing), ultrafast Internet (Fiber), futuristic headsets (Glass) and driverless cars.

The unexpected change marks a speedy and potentially risky shift for the Web colossus whose name years ago became a verb, upending a corporate-- America playbook that has preached reshufflings should be done dodderingly, if at all.

But Google executives said the “birth of Alphabet” meant far more than corporate wordplay and would instead mark both the start of “a very exciting newchapter in the life of Google” and the dawn of a strengthening push for the future Web.

“This new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google,” Larry Page, Google co-founder and Alphabet chief executive, wrote Monday in a post revealing the change.

The tech giant, one of the world’s most valuable companies, has invested heavily in the software, systems and infrastructure needed to keep its constellation of profitable breakthroughs connected.

Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, will become Alphabet’s president and executive chairman, respectively. Sundar Pichai, Page’s soft-spoken deputy and Google’s senior vice president, will become the search subsidiary’s chief executive.

Alphabet will remain a public company, replacing the Google name in trading and in shareholders’ portfolios (but not its symbol on Nasdaq, which will stay as GOOG and GOOGL). Shares in the company surged nearly 6 percent in after-hours trading.