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
When Google created the Alphabet holding company in 2015, the design was deliberate: Larry Page would run the parent, Sundar Pichai would run Google, and each subsidiary would get its own CEO. Four years on, Wired's assessment of that structure's legacy is pointed — the separation sometimes produced duplicated efforts between Google and the other Alphabet companies rather than clean division.
This week Page and Sergey Brin stepped back as Alphabet's leadership, handing Pichai both titles at once. The consolidation lands on a company already under internal strain, with separate coverage arguing Pichai's most urgent task is stabilizing Google's increasingly closed and antagonistic internal culture.
First-order effects
- Pichai now personally adjudicates the overlap the old structure created: where an Alphabet company duplicates Google's work, one executive — not two rival CEOs — decides which effort survives.
Second-order effects
- Subsidiary CEOs lose their structural buffer: VentureBeat's read of Pichai's two-year track record is that Alphabet companies can expect to either sharpen their focus or be folded into Google, raising the stakes for units like the moonshot bets the 2015 reorganization was built to protect.
Third-order effects
- If the fold-in pattern holds, Alphabet drifts from holding company back toward a Google-centric corporation — undoing the conglomerate logic of 2015 and setting a cautionary precedent for other tech giants weighing similar parent-company splits.
The trend: Alphabet's four-year holding-company experiment is being unwound into centralized control under Sundar Pichai, with subsidiary autonomy traded for consolidation inside Google.