As Google announces some changes in its recruitment policy, it also made some successive announcements regarding the shutting down of several of its products. While the announcement on downsizing its manpower maybe perceived by many with a heavy heart, the shutting down of some of its products is on the other hand a good corporate strategy for Google. Some of those products have served their purposes and or superseeded by a newer and better product.
First, the sad news. Google has asked some of its engineers located in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden to move to other Google Offices. Google is doing this to have lesser engineers who are working closely and more effectively with each other.
Google has also announced that it is also ending all its contract with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google as well as reducing its manpower base in its recruitment organization to around 100 positions only. The good news is Google is encouraging these employees to move to other jobs available at Google. As for the overall recruitment process of Google, we might see a slow down in this activity for quite some time.
In a related news, Google has also announced that it is officially closing the doors to some of its products which have been dormant for quite some time now. These products include Google Catalog Search which Google used for exploring OCR technology ages ago and which it obviously doesn’t need now, Google Video Upload which has long been dead, Dogdgeball, Mashup Editor end Jaiku, which was being touted before as a Twitter killer and Google Notebook.
Among these products, what I have used from time to time is Google Notebook. But there are certainly other similar Google products which can perform the same tasks done by Google Notebook. These products wouldn’t really be a big loss to Google and to the users since most of them should have been sent to the dead pool a long time ago.
Of course you might be asking by now whether Google is starting to feel the crunch of the current economic condition in the U.S. This might be related to that but it is certainly not yet a direct effect. Google is preparing for the worst to come, especially when economic analysis are predicting that the worst is yet to come in the financial market.
