"Waymo" was invented so that the press would stop calling them Google cars, because in case things go awry, Google as a whole would be under fire. This way "Waymo" (effectively a department of Google) can be thrown under the bus effortlessly with no PR damage to Google.
They don't want people thinking of Google when their cars are holding up traffic, turn out to be assholes when merging or changing lanes, or cause a fatal accident. Thus, Waymo.
In general I think separating brands is a good idea. And I think, at least from technical perspective (not legal perspective) you shouldn't blame Google in case something goes bad, and rather Waymo. After all, the set of people running Google search or Android are very different from those managing the self-driving car project.
In some sense, a single entity Google is an illusion so best to avoid it.
There are other reasons to have separate entities beyond just legal issues. You can find some guesses out there as to who was responsible for Alpha or why Alphabet was created. But having other 'bets' provides some niceties around: earnings reporting, and spinning-off/selling entities if needed.
I'm also guessing it helps lure in potential leaders like John Krafcik (CEO of Waymo), because these execs can come onboard with the title of CEO rather than some VP within Google. (though, Krafcik joined Google 1 year before Waymo was founded).
That's right. It definitely helps hiring. In the executive level by fancier titles (rather be one of thousand VPs or CFO of Waymo, it's not even a comparison), but also at more junior levels. The usual marketing spiel there is we are like a "startup" but with the resources of a giant company.
While they are different people, they are still the same money, and so Google's top managers still should be shamed for not investing enough in car safety.
I'm not sure the motivation was as ill-intentioned as you indicate. Yes they spun it off the but I don't think Google was re-structured into Alphabet (and subsidiaries) for this reason. Waymo is a self driving car business, Google is a search engine that provides online services. I don't think the two overlap in a way that makes sense to club their businesses together into one quarterly report.
And it worked. I must have missed the news when Waymo was spun off, because I didn't realize they were former Google folks until like... last week. I kept wondering where the hell these guys came from and how they suddenly had the money to come up with this super-advanced tech by themselves.
I'm not actually all that interested in self-driving cars at this point in their development (one can only be excited about a finite number of non-existent things at once), so I haven't been scouring articles, merely skimming (if even that). I've noticed the articles mention Google but figured they're mentioning it because Google also has a self-driving car they're working on.
TBH most of the articles I've read that mention Waymo are in relation to their lawsuit with Uber, and many of them say "Alphabet" and not "Google", and Alphabet still doesn't register as Google in my mind.
I think Google implemented one of the recommendations from Innovator’s dilemma. Where you want new ventures to be as independent from the parent company as possible. E.g. earnings of 1mm for parent company might be insignificant, but very desirable for a new product.
Google had to split into Alphabet divisions. Executive focus doesn't scale. Arguably, they did it too late, which is why they shit the bed so bad with Google Cloud, a technically superior offering that for years had poor support, no focus, and further fell behind AWS.
The printing press that is advertising there steals all the focus.
I'm convinced that if Waymo was a division of Google, they wouldn't be close to monetizing.
I think they just wanted something for investors to know by name outside of "other bets". Easier to say you're losing money investing in Waymo than their other more conventional money losing ideas.
It's probably for the best, same with the decision to change Google the megacorporation into Alphabet, with the Google brand focusing on search and internet.
All this reorganization happened after Ruth Porat took over as Google's new CFO. Prior to that, activities of the bread and butter money-making parts and more speculative parts of Google were not separated. This made investors nervous because while they viewed Google as a money factory, they also viewed it as run by crazy geniuses who might be wasting untold amounts of money on their fun research projects.
It seems Porat felt that Google would be in a better position by separating all that out so that things are more transparent to investors. If the stock price is any indication of how investors felt about that, she was right.
This doesn't mean that the Google brand couldn't still be applied to Waymo's activities, as is the case with Google Fiber, which kept the name. But it is not just Waymo that lost the Google brand in the process: Google X became just X, and Google Life Sciences became Verily.
Hard to tell why initially you were downvoted so much. It's actually a very interesting comment for me, and a very clever strategy because if Waymo fails, while the press will say it's Google owned, it will still be felt as a separated entity. If it succeeds there will be a stronger link between the two brands in people's mind, and such link can be made stronger via marketing.
I downvoted because it's a pretty strong and cynical-seeming accusation with little evidence. If it was suggested as a theory for the spinoff (or the entire Alphabet re-org?) or as one of the likely motivating factors, I think it would add to the discussion, but as-is, it's stated as fact that the sole reason for Waymo becoming its own company was to shield Google PR.
There are many Alphabet companies: Calico, CapitalG, Chronicle, DeepMind, Jigsaw, Nest Labs, Sidewalk Labs, Verily, Waymo. Is the idea that all of these were created under the same PR-driven motivation? I think it's much more reasonable that it was a legitimate re-org of a massive company, and that organizational units want their own identity and autonomy.
Are you sure? What about Google+? Guess they spent at least a billion for that.
Google's search and ad network is paying (directly or indirectly) for everything. All other projects are just to keep people using their search and seeing ads on their platform.
I don't have numbers but I was thinking to spectacular failures like Google Wave or similar software projects. For sure they were also built by large teams and costed a non trivial amount of money, but this kind of research on autonomous vehicles, it's spawning a much larger amount of time and requires non common experts, there are tons of legal issues related, and you don't stop because people are not using it... it is a technological problem so you spend more and more resources trying to crack it. So I've the feeling that it's significantly more costly than other attempts that Google did in the past, but I've no numbers. I guess the Waymo numbers are simpler to get, because now it's a spin-off (but we should add all the money spent before the spin-off), but the cost of things like Wave are near impossible to obtain, I can imagine.
Since the restructuring, it is Alphabet that is publicly traded. As a result Waymo is part of the publicly traded entity equally to Google. You can already invest in Waymo by investing in Alphabet.
That is true but what usually then would happen is successful businesses are then spun out and they do their own IPO.
Alphabet would retain controlling interesting. This is pretty common but not the only way. Sometimes parent company shareholders are given shares in the new company directly. So say every share of GOOG might be given a share of Waymo Inc for example. It is not always the case that the parent company keeps control.
It can also happen the other way where a sub is public and the parent does an IPO.
The structure of Alphabet is what gives the flexibility to do this.
They don't want people thinking of Google when their cars are holding up traffic, turn out to be assholes when merging or changing lanes, or cause a fatal accident. Thus, Waymo.