Google Alphabet: New name was predicted on Reddit a year ago

The only thing the post got wrong was the scale of the company's ambition

Attendees work on laptops during the Google I/O developers conference at the Moscone Center on May 15, 2013 in San Francisco, California (Getty Images)

Google’s huge new restructuring into a company called Alphabet seems to have been predicted on Reddit a year ago.

The search giant has launched a surprise new name, and will now be folded into a parent company called Alphabet. But the news might not have surprised one person, who put together a remarkably prescient image that appears to predict the change.

In a post titled “The New Age Alphabet: Google A to Google Z”, Redditor Ojus Naravane shared an image they had put together of Google products, showing how together they could take over each of the 26 letters.

The post shows the huge array of Google products that now exist, in addition to its famous search. That’s exactly what Google’s looking to emphasise with the new name — that it is now a phone network, a mapping company, a library and a video giant, as well as a search engine.

Google has been considering the move for the last four years, according to Business Insider, and it has certainly been setting up and acquiring companies that will now live under the Alphabet rather than Google banner.

But the alphabet prediction is presumably the result of good luck and coincidence, rather than prediction or insider knowledge.

In fact, the main way in which the prediction was wrong is that it underestimated the scale of Alphabet’s ambition: in the new company, Google represents only one letter, not all of them.

The rest is made up of the other companies that Google has either set up or required. For the moment, that includes Fiber, it’s phone network; Life Science, which develops a smart contact lens; Nest, the connected home business; and X Lab, the secretive, experimental division that works on products like drone delivery.

Alphabet presumably plans to work its way through the rest of the letters as it goes along, buying or setting up companies to fill the space that remains.