Google's parent company is tightening the purse strings on moonshot projects (GOOGL, GOOG)

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The CEO of one of Alphabet's subsidiary companies just showed how serious Larry Page was when he said blowing up Google's corporate structure would make it more "more accountable" for how it spends its gobs of advertising revenue.

"The fiscal discipline era has now descended upon everything," the CEO of Alphabet's smart thermostat company, Nest, told The Information's Reed Albergotti in an article published Thursday.

Google acquired Fadell's company for $3.2 billion in early 2014.

Since then, a slew of the company's products have faced technical problems, and Albergotti reports that several planned releases were delayed or killed indefinitely. Alphabet is reportedly pressuring Nest to release a new security-system product by the fall.

Fadell says Alphabet is putting its financial squeeze on his company as well as all other subsidiaries.

The message now, he says, is: "Hey, show us your business plan for the year. We're going to hold you to those numbers."

Fadell's candid observation comes less than a week after news broke about another sign that Alphabet is tightening the reins and increasing its revenue expectations.

The company is also trying to sell Boston Dynamics, the high-profile robotics startup it bought in late 2013 because it isn't likely to produce a marketable product in the next several years. Other members of the robotics division Google created several years ago, which was folded into Alphabet's experimental hardware lab, X, in December, also now have a mandate to identify a specific, real-world problem, complete with a road map and a business plan, or they will get reassigned to work on existing projects within the company.

Alphabet, which has a spin-off for "curing death" and is investing heavily in self-driving cars, is still taking its famous "moonshots," but it's keeping a closer eye on its balance sheet. This attitude lines up with what Wall Street has been hoping for.

After Google appointed a new CFO in Ruth Porat last year, analysts from Deutsche Bank wrote optimistically that her focus on disciplined spending seem to hint at the "dawn of a new era."

Quotes like Fadell's show that that era has come.

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