Alphabet turns a Page and a Brin

“GOOGLE IS NOT a conventional company,” declared Sergey Brin and Larry Page as they took their firm public in 2004. “We do not intend to become one.” On December 3rd they bowed out as, respectively, president and chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent and the world’s fourth-biggest listed firm. Their creation remains unconventional in some ways, if not in others. They leave a mixed legacy for Sundar Pichai, a career Googler in charge of its core search-engine business, who assumes both roles.

Messrs Brin and Page lived the Silicon Valley dream. Their solution to the problem of indexing the growing world wide web grew out of government-funded research at Stanford University, and was honed in a friend’s garage. Google was founded in 1998. Today it handles over 2trn search queries a year, and produces the Android operating system that powers 80% of the world’s smartphones. It has shaped the age of the internet and mobile computing in the way that Microsoft helped define the age of the desktop PC. Its revenues have grown from $3.2bn in 2004 to $136bn last year. Its market capitalisation has nearly doubled since 2015, to $910bn.