My Perspective: Google's name change is about regulation

It happened to Microsoft, it probably won't happen to Google/Alphabet.

Governments have a tendency of cutting tech giants to size. Not directly because they are too big, but because they are implicitly providing what starts to look like a public service. Typically, this comes in the form of a service that becomes the only de facto standard platform (e.g. Windows ... and Google) on which many other economically important activities are built.

In Google's case, there is a further and far more important issue, that of "insider" information. Google have it, they have a lot of it. Before, there was a sense of assurance that they had too much other information, and any needles were safely hidden in the huge mass of hay. However, with the recent discovery of deep learning techniques, the human capacity limit for intelligently reviewing this data is being removed. Machine learning capacity is many orders of magnitude greater for finding insights that no human team could possibly hope to match.

As Google kept pushing into exciting new pre-growth areas using their technological edge, it wouldn't have been long before governments would start asking exactly how much of their "insider" information they were using. They would say none, but with it all under the same roof, they would be swiftly (i.e. a few years) regulated into size anyway.

The Alphabet restructure is to smartly preempt all of this, and therefore unchain a long list of exciting possibilities that Google/Alphabet are certainly capable of implementing in the world. This is why their share price jumped on a simple name change.

Also, I was thinking ... Alphabet would be a great name for a hedge fund.

Chi