It's more likely that they found a better way to get rid of taxes. The European regulators are most likely not confused by a name change...

Best two comments I read:

Jesus Google! I know Google+ was bad, but re-branding the whole company still seems like an overreaction.

Google release notes:

- Our new name is Alphabet! We hope you like it.

- fixed a bug where we were paying too much tax.

From what I've read, this was strictly a decision to appease people internally at Google to avoid name dilution and to make it possible to put more focus on each of their products and services.

Google had become such a MASSIVE conglomerate that the name wasn't really resonating the way they wanted it to. Search engines, video services, operating systems, self-driving cars, wearable computers, even weather balloons providing wi-fi internet access, all are bearing the Google name, but there's also things Google owns which you wouldn't even begin to think of as Google properties, including health-related companies and an organization based on promoting climate change awareness.

So, speaking strictly from a business standpoint, in order to keep the Google name resonating with technology and internet services, they turned the company into Alphabet, are taking some aspects of Google and shifting them to be parts of Alphabet instead, and Google will continue to be a massive aspect of the company, just with less of the unnecessary bulk people don't typically associate Google as having.

Basically, the large conglomerate known as Google is now known as Alphabet which has a "smaller" piece of itself known as Google.

Yeah, it's a bit weird to wrap one's head around but it actually makes perfect sense and I get why Google would do this. The trouble is that the average person is NOT going to get this and instead is just going to latch onto it as Google stupidly changing their name to something ridiculous like Alphabet and that everything known as Google will suddenly be known as Alphabet... which yeah, that's really stupid, which is why that's NOT what's happening. :P

Nah, they just split into multiple smaller companies to avoid monopoly and gain more profit.

As I've written above, the monopoly explanation is wrong. Splitting things up but still keeping it under one umbrella doesn't change anything.

Are you talking about google the famous irish company or a different one 😀

It actually makes sense to disentangle Google's various divisions from each other. If they have to sell off a division or a division fails, then all the hard work of determining which assets go with the smaller company and which stay with Google has already been done. If they are all separate companies, it also limits their legal liability in case of a catastrophic failure that causes damage to the public. The smaller company can be sued to the limit of whatever assets it has, but that's all that can be sued for. The other parts of the business will be safe because they are legally separate entities.

I've been told they did this namechange so they can trademark and copyright every written document. 😁

Still I wished they went for a more fitting name, like the Umbrella Corporation or Omni Consumer Products.

Actually, I think they really should've misspelled "Alphabet" in some way, given that they already misspelled "Googol". :P

*tries a few spelling variations on the word*

...on second thought, scrap that idea... >_>;;;