The constraints of a tipsy economy have finally gripped Google's staff and some of its lesser-known/experimental services. Across a collection of company blog posts, the search giant has announced a relatively small batch of layoffs and staff shuffling. Google's layoffs and pending rearrangement of remote engineering staff are perhaps the most significant of all these announcements. Two posts on Google's Official blog, detail Google's changes to engineering and recruitment. Google has thousands of engineers working in 40 offices across more than 20 countries, and 70 of those engineers from offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden will either be reassigned to other projects or let go. Approximately 100 from Google's Recruitment staff will be laid off, but the company reiterates statements from its October quarterly earnings call that it is still hiring.Among Google's products to have the plug pulled on them will be: Jaiku and location-based social network Dodgeball are two of the more significant. Google purchased Jaiku (competition to Twitter) in October 2007. But the lack of communication and neglect began driving users to jump ship and head over to Twitter. Google announced this week that it will no longer actively develop jaiku's codebase, but it will become an open sourced project. Dogeball will be permanently shut down, with in " the next couple of months".
Google Notebook and Google Video are getting reduced, though neither will be totally and completely shut down. Google announced that it will stop active development on Notebook starting next week. This includes killing its Firefox extension, no new features, and new users will not be able to sign up(basically making it useless). Google Video, long considered to be a redundant product ever since Google purchased YouTube, will no longer be accepting uploads in a few months. The site will still work and all content will remain intact, but Google wants to morph the video search engine into there web search.
No comments:
Post a Comment