David McManus says August is not a dull tech month as firm develops

I have been contemplating my own impatience for moaning about the fact that August always seems like such a dull month in technology news.

Have I really reached the point where something exciting not happening for a week amounts to disappointment? You can see where the term ‘tech junkie’ comes from, can’t you?

There is now such a thriving world of gadgetry and high tech invention that it can be easy to forget that great swathes of human existence went by where nothing much happened at all.

The discovery of steam power and the ability to harness electricity that helped kick off the Industrial Revolution ushered in an age of marvels that has only accelerated since. Something happened to the human mind that caused it to crave innovation like never before.

It always staggers me to think that at the start of the 20th century, mankind had only just invented radio and the Wright brothers’ first flight was still a work in progress, then within 70 years we had walked on the moon.

Of course, those 70 years also saw us engage in the two bloodiest wars in our history.

Our current sense of technology advancing at such a rapid pace has undoubtedly been heightened by the smartphone.

The vast majority of us own one, yet within a few months new models come out, tempting us with their abilities and trying to make us feel as though our lives are somehow lacking without them. I don’t want to sound as though I have had some life-changing moment of revelation. I have not been visited by the ghost of Ned Ludd, convincing me that anything new is bad and should be destroyed. Far from it.

Technology will always fascinate me. I want to see it move forward as quickly as possible. I also realise the importance of taking stock to pause and appreciate these astonishing times.

It turns out August isn’t such a dull month for news after all.

Google is no more!

Well, Google as we know it has ceased to be. The huge company that had its many fingers in just as many pies has renamed itself Alphabet (https://abc.xyz/).

The core Google services we all use on a regular basis of search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android etc will remain exactly as they are, but be packaged up into a new, smaller Google that becomes a subset of its Alphabet parent company.

The more outlandish projects that the old Google used to engage in like driverless cars, medical research and advances in the ‘smart home’ will now be spun off into other subset companies under Alphabet which may be good news for some.

The move likely comes after investors’ concerns over where the old Google was spending its money. Investment will still be in the parent company – Google shares are to be automatically converted to Alphabet shares – but it will make it easier for the new organisation to be more transparent about the distribution of its revenue.

It probably isn’t unreasonable to suspect there are also some tax advantages to the reorganisation.