It seems like only a few weeks ago that Google was talking about its future fleet of helium filled solar powered airship servers orbiting the earth and dolphin-powered search engine algorithms. At least it sure sounded like that. Alas, the pie in the sky ideas are but a bit of crust left in the tin and Google has revealed itself to be not entirely immune to the ongoing recession.
While there is a heady whiff of schadenfreude in the online reactions to Google’s first announced layoffs coupled with a number of product shut downs it ought to be noted that the sky is far from falling.
In reality, Google has been carrying around the legacy of employees’s 20% time projects and sounded-good-at-the-time acquisitions for a while now. The offerings that are on the chopping block were for the most part superfluous and there are probably a dozen more where they came from.
How many of you have uploaded a video to Google Video, or used Jaiku or Google Notebook or Dodgeball or Catalog Search on a regular basis? These are trims around the edges that help Google to focus on their core business. Some of the functionality such as 10 minute + video uploading that is being lost will probably be taken over by other existing Google tools, such as YouTube.
In addition to cutting product offerings Google is also casting off about 300 recruiters. At the same time they are closing some of their far-flung engineering hubs. What they haven’t done is cut anyone from their core businesses.
What this all means is that they are trimming the fat, battening down the hatches and deploying every other metaphor that one uses to describe a company prepping for tougher times. The flipside of the coin is where they are putting resources – their core strength in search advertising.
Search ads are currently being tested in Google Images reply pages (see pic below) and Google is already rolling search ad technology out to their YouTube platform.
What this all means is that Google may not have the spectacular growth that they have had in the past – but will still grow and even surprise with how profitable they can be. So Google – Recession proof? Not so much. Recession Resistant? That’s more like it.
