The fourth quarter of 2022 has been rife with stories of corporations laying off swathes of staff. With many corporations partaking in cost-cutting measures, efficiency enchancment plans, and trimming the fats, Google has discovered a novel solution to preserve assets with out shedding staff.
After CEO Sundar Pichai’s all-hands assembly in September of this yr, the corporate has seen widespread restructuring and talks of layoffs. After strain mounted from traders to chop prices on the tech large, Pichai expressed his need to lay off roughly 10% of the corporate’s workforce. The corporate has already begun efficiency enchancment plans for its staff and can reportedly fireplace its lowest performers.
Aside from layoffs, Google is taking a look at inside restructuring and canning its so-called “Moonshots” to economize. The transfer to merge Waze and Google Maps is a part of this technique.
Waze was acquired by Google for $1.3 billion in 2013. Till now, the group sustaining the app has been a discrete unit, however that’s set to vary. The restructuring will consolidate overlapping mapmaking duties throughout Waze and Maps, reducing down the entire quantity of assets required to handle each merchandise.
Publish-merging, each groups will function below Google Geo, the group in command of Google Avenue View, Maps, and Google Earth. Christopher Phillips, who at present leads the Geo group, will now head each Waze and Geo.
Talking on this transfer, a Google spokesperson mentioned, “Google stays deeply dedicated to Waze’s distinctive model, its beloved app, and its thriving group of volunteers and customers.”
The corporate’s historical past at Google had largely been a easy journey till Noam Bardin, the CEO on the time of the merger, left in 2021. In a weblog publish, he detailed a few of the challenges he confronted after Waze merged with the tech large. He mentioned, “Wanting again, we might have in all probability grown quicker and far more effectively had we stayed unbiased.”
The app at present has over 151 million lively customers, and contributes a bulk of the visitors information used to offer prediction on Google Maps. It set the usual for user-generated alerts, akin to highway blockages and ongoing constructions, which has since been built-in into Google Maps.
Whereas Google has acknowledged that it’s going to not layoff any expertise in these two groups, the corporate continues to be below immense strain to chop prices. This transfer is likely to be the harbinger of extra restructurings and layoffs to return sooner or later.
