CUNY Author Jeff Jarvis Breaks Down Google’s New “Alphabet” Venture for Bloomberg News

What WON’T Google Do?

That seems to be the real question this week after the tech giant recently announced the creation of its new umbrella corporation, Alphabet.

CUNY Professor Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?” and his latest title, “Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News,” participated in a Bloomberg News segment discussing the implications of Google’s latest venture, which he described as a brilliant move.

“Google was being typecast as just a search engine company,” Jarvis said, “when the truth is for a long time it’s been much more… with Gmail and Google Maps and so on.”

“Google is really a personal services company,” he added. “To maximize that value, I think it needs to be able to concentrate on that.”

Google’s iconic search engine is only one of at least 78 businesses included in the soup of enterprises under the Alphabet Holding Company umbrella, which also includes Android, AdSense, YouTube, X Labs, and Finance among others.

Bloomberg reports Google investors showed confidence in the move with company shares up as much as five percent.

Bloomberg News Editor Tom Giles says that’s because of the potential for “unlocked value,” from the tech giant’s entrepreneurial ambitions.

“Now you have a bunch of new businesses that are going to be easier to set apart and possibly down the road sell IPO,” he said. “Some of them are going to fail miserably, but others are going to do really well.”

To watch the full segment, click here.

Jarvis’ latest book, “Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News,” examines the changing journalistic landscape and assesses the need for modern reporters to act as service providers, not just content creators.

To learn more about the book, click here.