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Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline – Until Now
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Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline – Until Now

Alphabet’s CFO Ruth Porat wants to bring focus to Mountain View. Can the moonshot factory adapt?

Max Chafkin and Mark Bergen
Bloomberg Businessweek , 2016
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Editorial Rating

7

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Recommendation

Can risk-taking innovation coexist with fiscal responsibility? In their detailed article, Bloomberg Businessweek reporters Max Chafkin and Mark Bergen explore this question by examining the reasons behind Google’s recent reorganization into Alphabet, and the fallout from that shift. With the change in structure, a company with a historical lack of internal financial strictures has found itself grappling with the question of how to balance financial discipline with the pursuit of risky creative projects. getAbstract recommends this article to everyone interested in Google, Alphabet and tech innovations.

Summary

Over the course of 2016, Google’s parent company Alphabet lost a number of project leaders in its research department Google X, now more simply known as X. Some view this development as the result of increased regulation of research projects which came with “Alphabetization” – that is, reorganizing Google into a collection of “standalone companies.” Does the outflow of innovators indicate a problem with how the company now approaches its highly ambitious innovation projects called “moonshots”? Put another way, will a more cautious approach to spending blunt X...

About the Authors

Max Chafkin writes for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Technology. Mark Bergen is a reporter covering Google and Alphabet at Bloomberg.

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