Larry Page and Sergey Brin, via the Google Blog:

We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet’s investment in our portfolio of Other Bets. We are deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term, and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we’re passionate about!

First of all, nice exclamation point!

Second, the letter basically says, “we’re stepping down as CEOs but not really; just like Google is a privately held company, but not really.”¹

Still, this is only the not-very-close second most hilarious thing that happened in tech sector in 2019. The first will always be how Mark Zuckerberg altered Facebook’s origin story:

When I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. The mood on campus was disbelief. It felt like we were acting without hearing a lot of important perspectives. The toll on soldiers, families and our national psyche was severe, and most of us felt powerless to stop it. I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently. Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.

[…] Since then, I’ve focused on building services to do two things: give people voice, and bring people together.

Let’s all forget how Facebook was started by a pervert as a sexiest and offending website that let brats to rate girls. Let’s all forget that Mark Zuckerberg was such an asshole to his co-founder that “Zuckerberg” is essentially a verb.

And if we are ranking more jokes, the runners-up are:

• Apple giving back the physical ESC Key and 1mm travel keyboard on the new MacBook Pro.
• Elon Musk having to finish the Cyberpunk announcement in front of a pickup truck with two holesdents in the glass.
• Huawei photoshopping surface of the moon onto a streetlight bulb.

I can’t wait to see what 2020 holds.