The big news is that Larry and Sergey are stepping back into a more Warren and Charlie kind of role, and Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Google.
My question is, what does "slimmed down" Google mean?
It means Google minus all the parts that are now their own direct subsidiaries of Alphabet.
Which, previously, were all part of Google. Hence, "slimmed down".
It's going to remove the 'is this a thing Google should be getting in to?' question when evaling ventures/acquisitions.
It looks like they're taking all the experimental research stuff out of Google and making them direct subsidiaries of Alphabet instead, particularly projects that aren't directly related to the Internet.
The article talked about Life Sciences and Calico, and I have to wonder if other stuff like the self-driving cars are going to become direct Alphabet subsidiaries as well (then again, maybe not: I assume the self-driving cars are tied closely to Google Maps).
A more focused company that's moving to the top level of this hierarchy is Nest.
Presumably they hope that something outside of the new google division will blow up and make the divisions a bit less lopsided.
Hopefully less likely to run afoul of antitrust regulation.
I have no reason to suspect this, that's just how I usually interpret wording like that.