Last year’s move by Google to split itself up into what amounts to different companies has paid off handsomely.

Still by no means a household name, Alphabet was created as a parent company to its more famous offspring in order to create greater transparency over where and how the organisation spends its money. When it announced its fourth quarter results for 2015 this week, Alphabet passed Apple as the world’s most valuable company.

Google has long been well known for its somewhat whacky aspirations. On the steady and boring side is its online advertising business which it has managed so successfully to incorporate into a world-beating search engine that for almost two decades has had companies handing over large chunks of their marketing spend.

But Google has a far more interesting and exciting side and it has the fittingly mysterious name of X.

Previously known as Google X, the parental moniker has been dropped presumably to create a clearer distinction between it and the search giant.

X is to the tech world what M is to James Bond. Its focus and raison d’être is brilliantly summed up by a Venn diagram put out by the company which sees three areas of ‘huge problems’, ‘breakthrough technology’ and ‘radical solutions’ overlapping each other and being the core of X. It’s the real world embodiment of that dreadfully overused phrase of ‘blue sky thinking’. Put simply, X wants to approach today’s challenges unhindered by anything that has gone before.

X’s most famous project has been the driverless car but it is also investing in Project Loon which will bring Internet access to rural parts of the world via high altitude balloons floating through the stratosphere.

Project Wing is researching drone deliveries which it hopes will eventually be used to transport essential equipment to remote areas and something called Makani is looking at breakthrough ways of developing cheap and clean energy – again, initially for developing areas of the world.

With the possible exception of the driverless car, these are all technologies that cost vast amounts of time and money in research and development and seem to be aimed primarily at genuinely improving the lives of the world’s poor; hardly areas that would usually generate excitement in investors and shareholders.

It was this unease that prompted the creation of the Alphabet parent company so that income and expenditure could be more openly broken down.

Spending on X projects, which Alphabet calls ‘other bets’ topped $3 billion last year with under half a billion profit made as a result. Taken alone, that sort of return on investment would be spectacularly unsustainable, but then there’s the other side of the company that does the more steady and boring stuff.

That side made sales of $21 billion in just the last quarter of 2015, raising its value on the stock market to $554 billion, beating Apple by about $3 billion.

What comes over as particularly incredible is that Google doesn’t even actually make anything.

Yes, it dabbles in the occasional Chromebook laptop and has a small share of the smartphone and tablet market with its Nexus range, but they amount to nothing when compared to the hardware being churned out by Apple at a pace that often falls short of demand.

We are unlikely to fall out of love with our iPhones any time soon and online advertising is still a reasonably stable concept, but it’s not impossible to imagine either thing losing its way at some point in the future.