Google co-founder Larry Page recently reflected on the candid guidance he received from Apple founder Steve Jobs during their last meeting in 2011, just weeks before Jobs’ death. As reported by Fortune, Page visited Jobs seeking advice and what he heard in return was a blunt thought, “The main thing I stressed was focus. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft.”
How Larry Page and Steve Jobs meeting shaped Alphabet ’s future
Recently, Google marked the 22nd anniversary of its IPO, one of the more telling moments in its history traces back to a visit Page paid to Jobs in 2011, near the end of the Apple cofounder’s life. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, the central message Jobs delivered to Page was about focus — pointing out that Google’s product lineup had become scattered and urging Page to narrow it down to just a handful of priorities, warning that the alternative was drifting toward Microsoft’s fate of shipping merely adequate products instead of great ones.Page admitted Jobs was right, telling Fortune in 2015: “He did fine as well.” In the immediate years after, Page directed Google to concentrate on Android and Google+, though Alphabet’s eventual creation in 2015 reflected a broader ambition. While Jobs urged restraint, Page believed Alphabet’s structure allowed multiple ventures—from Waymo to DeepMind—to coexist under one umbrella.
Taking the advice and then rewriting the playbook
In the immediate aftermath of that conversation, Page did lean into Jobs’s counsel, directing employees to concentrate on Android and the now-defunct Google+. But as the company’s ambitions kept expanding, Page ultimately arrived at a different philosophy than the one Jobs had pushed. Alphabet was conceived as a structure that could house Google’s more far-flung ventures — everything from telecommunications to transportation to experimental projects like glucose-monitoring contact lenses — under one roof.Speaking at a 2014 fireside chat with Khosla Ventures, Page pushed back on the idea that a large company should limit itself to only a handful of initiatives, framing that kind of restriction as counterintuitive for an organization of Google’s scale.Page and Brin were confident enough in Alphabet as both a name and a structural idea that they skipped market testing it altogether. Page has said he wanted a name employees could be proud to be associated with, but deliberately avoided something overly catchy, since Alphabet wasn’t meant to function as a consumer-facing brand the way Google itself did — it was designed instead as an umbrella brand for the various companies operating beneath it, aimed at employees and investors rather than the public. As for how the name came about, Page has been quick to give credit elsewhere: he chose the name Google, and Brin chose the name Alphabet.
