Google will not be spared by the current reorganizations affecting GAFAM, and new technologies in general. The company has announced that it will be laying off several hundred employees, mainly in its Pixel, Nest and Fitbit divisions.
The company, one of the most powerful in the world, has announced the dismissal of several hundred employees across a number of different teams, including the Fitbit division, which will be acquired for 2.1 billion in 2021. Dedicated to the sale of connected watches and health/fitness tools, Fitbit was in direct competition with the Pixel Watch, which Google has continued to establish as a regular product to link with its Google Pixel smartphones. So, among the employees let go by the American giant, Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are not spared.
In addition to the Fitbit division, the Pixel & Nest teams are also affected by hundreds of redundancies, including major cuts to the team dedicated to augmented reality. A Google spokesperson explained the budget cuts to Reuters: “Throughout second-half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”
A global crisis in tech
This situation is far from unique: the new technologies sector is in a global restructuring phase, particularly with the arrival of artificial intelligence in the workplace, which many employees dread. Microsoft and Google are among the companies most affected by this worldwide restructuring, but they’re not alone: the Twitch and Discord cases point in the same direction. Faced with cheaper automation, the tech giants therefore seem to be choosing to favor AI over their more expensive conventional workforce.
Source: Reuters
