It has been quite a journey for Larry Page and Sergey Brin who started Google as a research paper project in their Stanford University boarding house two decades ago.
Alphabet Inc. will welcome 2020 without the two leaders who have been constant figures since Google's birth. Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and Chairman Sergey Brin are stepping down from active management duty, Google's parent company disclosed Tuesday afternoon.
Sundar Pichai, who has been Google's top honcho since the company's evolution into the conglomerate popularly referred to as "Alphabet", will now act as both Alphabet and Google CEO.
Time to go
"With the company now well-entrenched and Google Inc and the other firms operating as independent companies successfully, it's the best time to simplify our management structure," Page and Brin wrote in a letter published on Tuesday.
"We have never been the ones to hold on to management roles when we think there is a better way to run the company. So two CEOs and a President are no longer needed by Alphabet and Google," they said.
Not long ago, rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. quickly overtook the company's search engine to get a large majority of search traffic, but the buyout of DoubleClick, YouTube and mobile sofware company Android catapulted Google to become more than just a search engine.
Most of the acquisitions and expansion transpired from 2001 to 2011 when Page was not yet the company's top boss, but he was still highly involved with the company's day-to-day activities alongside Eric Schmidt as chief executive officer.
Out of the limelight
Page slowly slipped out of the public spotlight after maintaining the top position in 2011, opting to remain under the shadows, especially after moving to the new corporate Alphabet system in 2015.
The switch to Alphabet made Pichai the executive in charge of the search company, and ultimately made Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat as the poster child of Alphabet, with Page acting as manager of the two executives including other capacities with a "CEO" attached to his name.
Google has become one of the most valuable companies in the world since Page returned to the CEO helm, with the company's market cap swelling from less than $200 billion at the start of this decade to over $900 billion at times this year.
According to FactSet, Google ended Tuesday with a $893.2 billion market value following a 24.7 percent gain so far this year.
