5 important changes Sundar Pichai could make right away at Alphabet now that Larry Page and Sergey Brin are gone (GOOG)

Sundar Pichai Google

Sundar Pichai has been CEO at Google for a few years, but now he is CEO of Alphabet, its parent company.
While Larry Page and Sergey Brin will remain majority shareholders, Pichai will — in theory — have more latitude to make big changes at the company.
From Google's efforts in China to its financial transparency, here are the biggest changes Sundar Pichai could make right away.
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21 years after they created Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin handed the keys to Sundar Pichai on Tuesday.

While Pichai was already CEO of Google for the past few years, Page and Brin occupied the top roles at Google's parent company, Alphabet. Now Pichai will have it all to himself.

Of course, Page and Brin are still the company's biggest shareholders, so Pichai won't truly be free of their oversight. How much free-rein Pichai ultimately has over the Alphabet empire, and how active Page and Brin will be from their seats in the boardroom, is probably the biggest question coming out of Tuesday's news.

But even as we wait to see how it plays out, there are a few key places where Pichai could quickly choose to make his mark. Here are five of the biggest:

1. Google and China

Google has a long and complicated history with China, having entered the country in 2006, and then pulled out with great fanfare a few years later to protest what it said were onerous censorship rules by Beijing. When The Intercept reported that Google was secretly building a search app for the China market in 2018 many employees revolted, and Google backed off.

Brin, who emigrated from Soviet Russia as a child, was an outspoken critic of Chinese censorship. As long as he was a public face of the company, Google could not try to do business in China without completely forfeiting its credibility. With Brin out of the picture, that calculus changes. And as shareholders pressure Google to continue delivering strong revenue growth, Pichai is going to have to make a tough decision about China.

sergey brin

2. The military industrial complex

The flip side of the China coin for Google is the military — a business that Google has long sworn off. The company's refusal to work with the US Department of Defense on "offensive" technology (including a $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract that it recused itself from) has left Google vulnerable to charges that it is "unpatriotic."

If Google were ever to re-enter the Chinese market, its objection to working with the US military would become even more problematic.

A cynical, but not implausible, solution for Alphabet's new boss: Simultaneously lift the ban on military work in the US and open up for business in China.

3. YouTube and Google Cloud financials

Google's famous lack of transparency when it comes to its various businesses is another legacy of the Page-Brin era. As Pichai looks for ways to stand out from his predecessors and to win favor with Wall Street, an easy move would be to pull back the curtain on the YouTube and Google Cloud financials.

The company already gave a glimpse at Google Cloud in July when it said the business had reached an annual revenue run rate of $8 billion. But investors would likely celebrate more information, especially since by all indications the businesses are growing strongly.

And given how big YouTube and Cloud already are in their respective markets, it's hard to imagine that Google would be giving away any big secrets to its competitors by reporting the numbers.

4. Goodbye to TGIF

The weekly all-hands meetings have been a Google tradition from the very early days, and has since become a Silicon Valley custom adopted by Facebook, Twitter and others. But Pichai is not bound by the same sensibilities and historical baggage that made it difficult for Page and Brin to end the tradition (even though the pair essentially stopped attending the meetings for more than a year).

In fact, Pichai already recently announced that the meetings would now be held on a monthly basis, instead of every week. Don't be surprised to see them go away altogether.

Google walkout London

5. The Alphabet name

Is it time to go end the Alphabet charade? After all, the name, and the holding company structure, was never really much more than a clever deflector shield.

By putting all the expensive, cash-burning moonshot projects like self-driving cars and solar-powered internet balloons into a holding company, Google could tell investors it wasn't really wasting its focus and capital on expensive side projects (even though Google's advertising business still subsidizes all these efforts).

But Pichai may see merit to uniting all his troops back under the Google flag, bringing back some of the glamour and esprit de corps that once held together the massive corporation, if only on the surface. At the very least, he could continue to re-absorb businesses and products that previously were part of Google.

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