From a Washington Post story by Gerrit De Vynck, Caroline O’Donovan, and Naomi Nix headlined “The age of the Silicon Valley “moonshot’ is over”:

Eight years ago, Google’s founders split the company up into separate entities and named the collection Alphabet. The idea was to separate the core business — the company’s giant advertising machine that made it one of the most powerful corporations in the world — from the side projects that needed time to develop but could one day become Google’s next big moneymaker.