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Google Combining Waze Maps Cost Cutting – Earlier this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai embarked on a cost-cutting mission to make the company more efficient. Since then, we’ve seen the company discontinue Stadia, half of the Area 120 projects, the Pixel laptop, and much more. However, the latest cost-cutting measure involves merging the Google Maps and Waze teams into one.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Google is combining the 500-person Waze team with its Google Maps team. The decision to merge the two teams appears to be an attempt to eliminate overlapping mapping work in its Waze and Maps products.
Google Combining Waze Maps Cost Cutting
Given the similarity between the two products, they overlap in many areas. Both Waze and Maps offer navigation help, world maps, and places of interest. But Waze’s defining feature is its participatory reporting on things like road hazards or speed cameras.
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That all is well and that “Google remains deeply committed to Waze’s unique brand, its beloved app, and its thriving community of volunteers and users.” Google’s PR also claimed that the company plans to keep Waze as a standalone service.
While this all sounds good on the surface, if you dig a little deeper, this restructuring doesn’t bode well for Waze as it continues to operate as an independent company. This situation is not far from what happened with Nest.
As a reminder, Nest was acquired by Google in 2014 and continued to act as an independent company for a little while. Eventually, the company merged with the Google Hardware team and lost its status as an independent company.
It’s likely that a similar fate awaits Waze after this restructuring, as it becomes less clear why the two apps remain separate. But for now, we’ll just have to wait and see if Google commits to keeping Waze as its own company. Alphabet Inc.’s Google plans to combine the team working on the Waze mapping service with the group overseeing the company’s Maps product. , as the search giant faces pressure to streamline operations and cut costs.
Report: Google Cutting Jobs At Waze While Merging Map Products
Google plans to merge Waze’s more than 500 employees with the company’s Geo organization, which oversees the Maps, Earth and Street View products, starting Friday, according to a Google spokeswoman.
Waze CEO Neha Parikh will step down after a transition period, the spokesperson said. Google said it plans to keep Waze as a standalone service and does not plan to make any layoffs as part of the reorganization.
Google expects the restructuring to reduce overlap in map creation tasks between the Waze and Maps products, the company said.
“Google remains deeply committed to Waze’s unique brand, its beloved app, and its thriving community of volunteers and users,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been looking for areas to improve efficiency following slowing advertising growth this year. In September, Mr. Pichai said he wanted Google to become 20% more productive and indicated that the company could merge teams working on overlapping products.
Activist hedge fund TCI Fund Management called on Alphabet to aggressively cut costs last month, writing in a letter to management that it believed the company’s headcount was too high.
Google acquired Waze in 2013 for $1.1 billion, the company’s fourth-largest deal at the time. The acquisition attracted the attention of regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission, which ultimately decided not to challenge the deal.
Waze has 151 million monthly active users of its crowdsourced mapping service, known for keeping detailed traffic data. She has also worked to develop an advertising business in recent years.
Google Merges Maps And Waze Teams, But Will Keep Apps Separate
The service operated largely independently of Google Maps after the acquisition, although Google integrated some popular Waze features into the flagship product.
In 2021, Noam Bardin, the CEO who piloted Waze until its sale to Google, left the company to launch Post, a Twitter competitor.
Mr. Bardin later wrote a blog post describing the challenges he faced after joining Google, including navigating recruiting practices and the company’s internal bureaucracy.
“All of our growth at Waze post-acquisition is due to the work we did, not support from the mothership,” Mr. Bardin wrote in the blog post. “Looking back, we probably could have grown faster and much more efficiently if we had remained independent.”
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Christopher Phillips, a former music technology executive, leads the Geo organization that will oversee Waze. The department’s employees previously reported to Don Harrison, Google’s president of global partnerships and corporate development.
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You are now subscribed to our newsletters. If you cannot find any emails from us, please check the spam folder. Google plans to combine teams working on its Maps product and Waze, a mapping service acquired by Google in 2013. The merger comes as the search engine giant feels pressure to cut costs and consolidate its operations, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Could Google Maps Merging With Waze; Represent The Both Worlds?
Waze’s team of 500 employees will report to Google’s Geo organization, which oversees Maps, Earth and Street View, starting Friday. Neha Parikh, current CEO of Waze, will step down.
Google told the WSJ that it plans to keep Waze as a standalone service – Waze is known for crowdsourcing en route information such as the locations of speed cameras, police cars and traffic accidents.
Google also said it did not expect any layoffs as part of the reorganization. However, layoffs are rife in the tech world, whether you’re a startup or an Amazon. And they often hit hardest when there is redundancies between teams. Indeed, Google has said it expects the restructuring of the different mapping services to reduce overlap in map creation.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, said he hoped to make Google 20% more productive by operating “with fewer resources.” Speaking at Code Conference in September, the executive said the company had become slower due to over-hiring and seemed to hint that merging teams working on overlapping products would help the company stay on top. You are here: Home / Applications / Google Maps and Waze teams merge as Google continues cost-cutting measures
Google: Google Lays Off Staff At Its Mapping App Waze
We’ve known that changes were coming internally at Google since CEO Sundar Pichai uttered the phrase “Don’t equate fun with money” in response to questions from concerned employees about cost-saving measures. by the company. Some of these measures included tightening travel and other budgets, but more importantly, potential layoffs.
It seems that the company had to resort to shortcuts or even the elimination of entire teams, as was the case with the Stadia team. Most recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google would merge the Waze and Google Maps teams, while keeping the two apps separate. However, no changes to the end-user experience have been revealed as part of this internal change.
The tech giant plans to combine the efforts of its more than 500 Waze employees with those of Geo, the Google division responsible for Maps, Google Earth and Street View. Waze CEO Neha Parikh will step down after a transition phase, according to a Google spokesperson who spoke to the WSJ. However, no layoffs are planned, which is good news.
The move follows the company announcing a drastic decline in third-quarter sales and previously dismantling its Area 120 startup incubator. Additionally, Google implemented a two-week hiring pause in July and announced it would slow its hiring pace for the rest of the year. However, Google isn’t the only tech company currently taking drastic steps to cut costs. Meta, for example, announced last month that it was cutting jobs due to declining e-commerce revenue.
Waze Route Planner & Finder
Until Google actually gets rid of the Waze app, I think it makes sense to reorganize its teams so that they all fall under one organization, especially if it means that laying off employees is not not possible. Either way, we should be ready for more changes as things improve and stabilize, because we all know that Google has no qualms about removing a product from its ecosystem when it doesn’t makes more business sense. I just hope Waze survives this wave. The Wall Street Journal reports that more than 500 Waze employees will join Google’s Geo organization, responsible for Maps, Earth and Street View. The move takes place today.
There are no layoffs as part of the move, but Waze CEO Neha Parikh will leave her position after a transition period, a Google spokeswoman told the WSJ.
Google is tightening its belt, along with the rest of the technology sector, in the face of uncertain macroeconomic conditions.
In September, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, said he wanted to improve efficiency by 20% and cited examples of downsizing a team and merging two products into one, it was reported CNBC at the time. For example, YouTube Music and Google Play Music have become one product.
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However, Google has no plans to change Waze’s status as a standalone product, which currently has 151 users.
