People are saying this Reddit post predicted Google Alphabet a year ago

News that Google would be restructuring into a holding company called Alphabet took the internet by surprise yesterday.

But people are saying that a Reddit post from one year ago might have predicted the shift — or at least the new name.

The post showed up on /r/google, a subreddit dedicated to discussing Google, and was made by user /u/ojusn. It shows a user-created graphic that lays out a Google product for every letter of the alphabet, except for J. 

A is for Google Analytics, according to the graphic. B is for Google Books. C is for Google Chrome, and so on.

After the Z entry, for Google Zeitgeist, it says in the bottom right corner, "google alphabet."

It's entitled, "The New Age Alphabet: Google A to Google Z, can you thk [sic] of something for the letter J?"

People on Twitter are passing around the Reddit post, and they're crediting it with predicting Google's transition to Alphabet.

Saying the user "predicted" the change is a bit generous, though. The Reddit post says nothing about the actual changes implicated in Google's switch to Alphabet.

The poster wasn't explicitly predicting just the name change, either.

Also, there are holes in this theory. TI Tech reporters have informed me that a few of the products listed in the graphic, like Nexus Q and Google+ Local, are no longer in service.

But everybody loves a good conspiracy theory — especially this super sleuth, who has a profound reason for why there's no J product.

We've reached out to Google about whether the existence of all of these products really did lead to the name change and will update when we hear back.

But for now, we do have a Larry Page press release to go on. Here's what he said about how Google arrived at the name Alphabet:

We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity's most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!

So, for now it looks like the naming process was not quite as poetic as that Reddit user's extended acrostic. 

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