Photo

A 12-meter-tall high-altitude air balloon floating over a remote area of New Zealand in 2013. Google has funded experiments such as Project Loon, which aimed to provide Internet access to rural and remote areas.Credit Google

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Shortly after its founding, Google posted a document on its site called “Ten things we know to be true,” an effort to distill its unusual corporate culture into a succinct list of prescriptions — the 10 commandments of Googliness. Among the most-quoted of Google’s big thoughts has been that corporations should “do one thing really, really well.” Google’s one thing, the document said, was obvious: “We do search.”

That idea may now seem absurdly quaint, given Google’s expanding universe of products, which are as varied as operating systems, a web browser, email, cloud storage, self-driving cars and, yes, even a search engine. But even when the document was posted, in 2000, there was uncertainty at Google about whether the company could really maintain its focus on search. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, its two founders, had long harbored far-reaching visions for how technology could transform the world, and it looked unlikely that they would limit their ideas to a web search engine.

“I wrote it and they approved it, but Larry knew that at some point we were going to have to update that,” said Douglas Edwards, an early marketing director at Google and the original author of Google’s “Ten Things” document. Mr. Edwards said he faced particular resistance from Mr. Page on the “do one thing” item.

“Larry’s vision was always to be something like General Electric, and Google was only his first proof-of-concept,” said Mr. Edwards, whose book “I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59” recounts his years at the company. “It was never going to be the endpoint.”

This history is worth recounting in light of Mr. Page’s announcement on Monday that Google will restructure its operations into a General Electric-like conglomerate called Alphabet, of which the search company will become just one division.

From the start, Mr. Page has been afflicted with a desire for two competing corporate virtues: focus and expansiveness. As Google argues in its “Ten Things” document, the best technologies come out of an obsessive dedication to working on a single large problem. But as Mr. Page has stated repeatedly, the tech industry is rapidly producing expertise he believes can be applied to dozens of other problems that affect humanity — a belief that argues for an expansive application of Google-style tech to a variety of endeavors.

In the past, Mr. Page’s desire for focus and expansiveness has been the basis of good-natured industry jokes. “Google is focused. On everything,” Aaron Levie, the chief executive of the cloud-based data storage company Box, once tweeted. But the new corporate structure is a typically elegant way to reconcile Mr. Page’s seemingly divergent ambitions. By creating a half-dozen (for now) adjacent companies that are each dedicated to solving a technological problem, the structure allows for both tactical narrowness and strategic breadth.

In short, it lets Mr. Page focus. On everything.

And this move is in some ways bigger than Google alone. In terms of stock market valuation, Google is outmatched in Silicon Valley by Apple, but it is peerless in the industry as an exporter of corporate culture. Google pioneered what has become the archetype of the modern Silicon Valley company — an engineering-driven culture in which internal hierarchies are suppressed, empirical evidence is prized and people are given wide leeway to work on problems that excite them, even if they seem far removed from a central corporate mission.

Now, by creating a formal structure to enshrine the goal of working on far-ranging problems, Google (or, rather, Alphabet) is offering a template for the next evolution of a modern tech firm — one that can do a lot more in many different corners of the world, for better or for worse.

In his letter explaining the new structure, Mr. Page argues that a conglomerate will allow for “more management scale,” letting him and Mr. Brin more efficiently “run things independently that aren’t very related.” It will take some time to find out whether he is right.

But if the bet proves successful, it could be a widely copied effort. Over the last few years, the tech industry’s outsized ambitions to press ever more deeply into our lives has generated both worry and amusement. Tech founders increasingly argue that every sector of modern life, including health care, transportation, media and education, will be improved by the liberal application of computing technology.

Now Google has created a structure to realize just this supposed utopia.

Yay?