Earlier this week, Google surprised the world with the launch of Alphabet, a parent company that will encompass a bunch of individual entities, including Nest, Sidewalk Labs, Calico, and a “slimmed down” Google.
When Google cofounder Larry Page — who will become CEO of Alphabet while Sundar Pichai will steps us as CEO of Google — posted about the news on Google +, he made sure to reassure followers of the social network’s future.
As Marketingland’s Danny Sullivan first pointed out, Page only responded to one of the 297 different comments and questions on his original post:
Google’s been slowly dismantling the struggling Google+ for months, recently even announcing that people will no longer need an account to use any other services, like YouTube or Maps.
In the wake of the subsequent headlines proclaiming that Google+ is dead, though, here now is Page taking the time to remind everyone that the company still loves it after all.
Page may still care about it and Google+ might not be resting in its grave, but the July announcement was Google essentially admitting the defeat of one of its core original goal of using Google+ to give users one identity across all of its services.
Two former Googlers Business Insider spoke to about the Alphabet news actually analogized the splitting of Google to the disintegration of Google+.
When the social network first launched, it was pitched as the grand unifier of all of Google’s products, the backbone powering YouTube, email, Maps, Hangouts, everything, just as, since the beginning, the Google brand unified an increasingly wide array of products and experimental businesses. Both Google and G+ pulled apart their infrastructure around the same time.
As reported by Business Insider