A look at the mixed legacy of Alphabet's organizational structure, which sometimes led to the duplication of efforts among Google and Alphabet's other companies
With Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepping back (again!), Google CEO Sundar Pichai is now in charge of Alphabet—and its dysfunction.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2015 holding-company restructuring was sold as liberation: subsidiaries would get their own CEOs and run free of Google's gravity, with Larry Page at Alphabet's helm. Four years later, Wired's audit finds the structure produced the opposite of separation in places — duplicated efforts between Google and its sibling companies — as one strand of a mixed legacy.
The step-down announced this week hands both layers to one person for the first time since that split: Sundar Pichai now runs Google and Alphabet together, while related coverage flags two inherited problems — an increasingly closed and antagonistic Google culture built on his watch, and a portfolio whose fate he has already signaled through precedent.
First-order effects
- Pichai now answers for Alphabet's non-Google businesses directly, collapsing the buffer that previously let Page absorb scrutiny over the 'other bets' while Pichai ran the core.
Second-order effects
- Per VentureBeat's read of his two-year record, Alphabet subsidiaries face a binary under his leadership — become more focused or get folded into Google — which turns duplication with the core from an organizational quirk into a consolidation trigger.
Third-order effects
- If the fold-in pattern holds, the holding-company experiment functionally unwinds back toward a single company, with Alphabet reduced to a legal shell rather than an operating philosophy — a cautionary template for conglomerate-style structures across tech.
The trend: Big Tech's conglomerate era is consolidating around core-product control, as Alphabet's own-bets structure gives way to a single CEO governing both parent and flagship.