I...have no freaking clue what to think...

Best explanation I've seen so far:

http://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/630850830166421504

That's funny. I read the announcement before seeing this tweet, and the first thing I thought was that it's a restructuring for accounting purposes.

Someone has also registered the following domain, it seems:

http://abc.wtf

Make sure to check out the hidden link in this sentence on http://abc.xyz, period.

I'm watching the outcome of this with guarded enthusiasm. Nest being spun back out as it's own company under Alphabet is good to me. I disliked their integration into a business who's primary focus is advertising.

There is likely many reasons this was done, and a good chance part of it is shady business reasons. One that I haven't seen discussed much is the change in liability. I think Google learned some hard lessons when they bought Motorola for the patents. Had the patent lawsuits all went in favor of those fighting Google, it could have put far more then Android at risk.

There is still a large liability target with Google today, but it's at least aligned with all the business units focused on ads. Nest's liability if someone dies from a faulty Protect, or the liability with the self driving cars is now isolated to those businesses. At least I believe so, but I'm not fully up to speed on the laws in this regard with the type of reorganization they are doing.

I moused over the entire sentence, but no link appeared.

That is because they've used CSS to change the cursor to be the text caret. The link is on the full stop after "our drone delivery effort".

Use the source Luke...

They use CSS to obfuscate the link.

In firefox, by hovering on the period (.) at the end of the sentence, a url appears where the status bar used to be. It's a link even though not shown as clickable. You can take a look at the page source too (Ctrl-U).

[edit]Beaten to it...[/edit]

Okay, that right there, that, that is evil.

Larry Page has proclaimed himself the Phoenix King!


...sometimes you have to make jokes just for yourself. Any other Avatar fans here? Bruno would get it...