More job cuts ahead at Google

Stephen Withers
Friday, 13 February 2009 02:29

IT Industry - Market

This week's instalment comes from a little known corner of the Google empire.

Since 2006, the company has been offering advertising services for broadcast radio.

But no more: "While we've devoted substantial resources to developing these products and learned a lot along the way, we haven't had the impact we hoped for," said Susan Wojcicki, vice president product management at Google.

Google Audio Ads and AdSense for Audio will be phased out by May 31, and the company hopes to sell the Google Radio Automation business.

But Google isn't completely exiting the audio ad business, as it will apply existing technology to the "emerging advertising space" of streaming audio.

Even allowing for that and for the possibility of redeploying staff to other areas of the company, Wojcicki predicted that up to 40 people would be retrenched.

So the story seems to be the stealthy layoff of large numbers of contractors, plus a death by a thousand cuts for the permanent workforce.

Apart from the individual hardship involved, the sad thing is that there is apparently no evidence that layoffs improve long-term financial performance.

By the time the savings actually materialise, conditions improve and the company is faced with the expense of hiring new employees - typically with the same skills of those that were retrenched 12 to 18 months earlier.