Why Did Google Create Alphabet?

Monday was a rather slow news day until Google shook things up. Rather than having Google and its various projects under one Google umbrella, Google will create a new company, dubbed Alphabet, which will handle all efforts not tied to Google's core mission.
Larry Page will move from CEO of Google to CEO of Alphabet, while Sergey Brin will serve as president. At Google, the company's head of Android and Chrome, Sundar Pichai, will become its new CEO.

The move means Pichai and the Google team can focus on the things for which Google is known, like search and Android. Page and Brin, meanwhile, can focus on those moonshot projects like self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and smart contact lenses.
But why create Alphabet? What's the point? "Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren't very related," Page wrote in a blog post.
That's nice, but probably not the whole story. The Internet was, not surprisingly, full of hot takes last night, but there were some interesting theories floating around. Here's what they were saying.

• The New York Times suggests that "Page has been afflicted with a desire for two competing corporate virtues: focus and expansiveness." Google is great at search, but its expertise can be applied to so many other things, too. Alphabet "is a typically elegant way to reconcile Mr. Page's seemingly divergent ambitions."
• Harry McCracken at Fast Company says Page doesn't want to deal with the day-to-day minutiae of Google product development. "Creating Alphabet allows Page to give Pichai the job without pulling himself away from the parts of Google he's passionate about," McCracken writes.
• Similarly, the move will help calm investors, Forbes says. "They've always been wary of all the non-search, non-advertising businesses Google has entered, and their inevitably uncertain prospects have no doubt weighed on the shares if only because they're much more of a cost for years to come rather than significant revenue generators."
• The Wall Street Journal points out that Alphabet could attract talent by offering shares in some of its smaller companies, allowing it to better compete with start-ups that are poaching employees from bigger firms.
• Bloomberg argues that Google is modeling itself after Warren Buffett. The billionaire's "Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is a holding company for disparate businesses ranging from insurance and railroads to running shoes and ice cream," Bloomberg wrote. "In the past five decades, he's built one of the largest businesses in the world by eschewing fads, buying when others sell, and taking a long-term approach to investing."
• The Guardian, meanwhile, suggests that the move might help Google battle EU regulators. "Google itself is still a massive beast, which will have to tread carefully around regulators, but it will be easier to present firms such as Nest, Calico and Fiber as separate entities if they are only united by a common owner," the paper says. "And, if the worst happens for Google, it would be easier to hive off the subsidiaries entirely."