[bayindirh]

X was Google X, now it's Alphabet X. Google was Google, now it's Alphabet Google.

Google was the name of the search engine and the company. Now the company name has changed, everything is restructured and Google is an ad platform with a search engine.

"X Development LLC. is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010, which now operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. X has its headquarters about a mile and a half from Alphabet's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California."[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)

[nikitaga]

"X is what Google used to be." didn't strike me as a comment about the paperwork of corporate restructuring, but rather a comment on how Google isn't doing interesting things anymore. And I don't think anything changed in that regard. They just pulled non-core businesses such as X into Alphabet Inc. That doesn't mean that what X is doing used to be more important to Google than it is to Alphabet now, it's just paperwork.

[bayindirh]

> Google isn't doing interesting things anymore.

I think they've founded X because Google's interesting ideas got too big for a single department, so they spun it off.

We don't know how many smaller X inventions get into Google ecosystem. I'm sure that some of that research got integrated back into their data centers or networking hardware, etc.

[murbard2]

That's the name of the legal entity. The actual name, if memory serves, is "X, the moonshot factory".