Google to Reinvent itself as "Alphabet"

[GhostShip]

This is somwewhat strange 

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/10/google-alphabet-parent-company

Google is dead. Long live Alphabet.

The tech company announced on Monday that it would rebrand itself as Alphabet – a new holding company whose largest wholly owned subsidiary will be Google.
In a surprise blogpost made public after the stock markets closed, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders, announced a radical shake-up of the company’s corporate structure and management, handing control of its core search engine business to rising star Sundar Pichai.
The new company, Alphabet, will preside over a collection of companies, the largest of which will be Google. Even the site’s new address eschewed convention: https://abc.xyz/

No doubt we will see the rationale behind this major move some short time in the future, I always start thinking of off shore tax fiddles when a large company starts restructuring and name changing out of the blue.

[GhostShip]

It seems they dont even have to go offshore, just head back to Delaware, the tax free home of many corporate entities in the US.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/11/google-alphabet-delaware-tax-loophole

Google’s Street View cameras have photographed locations across the world, allowing armchair tourists a view of anything from the Tower of London to Tiananmen Square. But one address is notable by its absence. The office building at 2711 Centerville Road in Wilmington, Delaware, a small town just south of Philadelphia, has not been captured by the Street View cameras. And yet this is the official address of Google Inc, the holding company of one of the world’s most successful software groups.

Google was founded in California and incorporated there in 1998, but in August 2003, a year before its initial public offering, the group reincorporated in Delaware. The creation of Alphabet Inc maintains the status quo, with Google confirming the new entity will also be registered in the small north-eastern coastal state whose tolerance of corporate secrecy and business friendly tax laws have seen it labelled as one of the world’s top tax havens.

[Trestor]

Another reason, as I understand it, is to create a distance in public perception between google and other projects they may want to engage in, either because of some failures in the past that had the word Google attached to them, or perhaps other things that may produce an adverse public reaction. What surprises me is that the name Alphabet isn't already owned by someone else.