Alphabet is a collection of companies, including Google, Verily Life Sciences, GV, Calico, and X. In October 2015, Alphabet became the parent holding company of Google, with the companies far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries. Alphabet is the world’s third-largest technology company by revenue and one of the world’s most valuable companies. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
The establishment of Alphabet Inc. was prompted by a desire to make the core Google business “cleaner and more accountable” while allowing greater autonomy to group companies that operate in businesses other than Internet services. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced their resignation from their executive posts in December 2019, with the CEO role to be filled by Sundar Pichai, also the CEO of Google. Page and Brin remain employees, board members, and controlling shareholders of Alphabet Inc.
Page explained the origin of the company’s name:
We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!
In a 2018 talk, Schmidt disclosed that the original inspiration for the name came from the location of the then Google Hamburg office’s street address: ABC-Straße.
Alphabet has chosen the domain abc.xyz with the .xyz top-level domain (TLD), which was introduced in 2014. It does not own the domain alphabet.com, which is owned by a fleet management division of BMW. Following the announcement, BMW said it would be “necessary to examine the legal trademark implications” of the proposals. Additionally, it does not own the domain abc.com, which is the domain of the Disney-owned American Broadcasting Company.
