I suspect you mean, "at that point", talking about after "the coming months". If you do indeed mean today (at this point), then I'm actually curious why you think forming the opinion now isn't hasty.
That is very understandable, even many native speakers get the same sorts of things confused. Your comment just didn't seem so controversial as the lighter text suggested so I was hoping to clear that up. Thanks for confirming!
They don't need to do a layoff to do a layoff. If you just set the (new) HC to 0 or significantly below replacement rate, you get reduction in staff just due to churn. When teams are sizeable, even with very low churn they lose employees over time. And then if you are more insidious, you can start introducing unpopular measures "in the name of business" that increase churn.
I am saying that this move is largely unrelated to the TCI memo. The WSJ article goes further:
>In September, Mr. Pichai said he wanted Google to become 20% more productive and indicated the company could merge teams working on overlapping products.
TCI's memo highlights five areas they think need to be adjusted, none of which Alphabet acquiesced to with this restructuring.
To be frank: don't know, don't care, and I don't need to have an answer to that question in order to be able to disagree with your original point. You came to this thread telling Googlers that the blame for this lies with TCI. I was curious, so I read TCI's memo and the WSJ piece. Now that I've done so, I simply find your assertion far-fetched, for these differences:
TCI
- Sent letter to Alphabet in mid-November
- Holds a mere .5% of Alphabet's market cap
- Asked for headcount reduction
- Asked Alphabet to pay employees less
Alphabet
- Publicly commented in September that they intended to combine overlapping groups
- Combined overlapping groups
- Didn't lay anyone off
That's it. At this point, given your slightly elevated tone in your most recent responses, it's starting to feel as though you began commenting with an axe to grind, and are now left holding an axe but are unsure what you should do with it. Maybe just put it down?
The genesis here was me keying off of related phrases within the WSJ piece:
"...Amid Pressure to Cut Costs"
"...faces pressure to streamline operations and cut costs"
Ok, great. So, my question is where is this pressure coming from?
"The activist hedge fund TCI Fund Management called on Alphabet to aggressively cut costs last month, writing in a letter to management that it thought the company’s head count was too high"
This is the WSJ suggesting that there is a link (granted they do not give confidence intervals) between these things. You could argue that perhaps WSJ is just poorly suggesting that there is a general "background radiation" of "pressure" related to Google.
So it's not like I'm just fabricating this link :)
But since you asked, the larger point and the particular axe I have to grind (that is permanently attached to my hand) is that investors have more power than the collective google employees do, do not have employee interests in mind at all, and Google management and the board will always align with investors NOT employees.
If they intended to maintain it as a separate app, why did the leader of it leave? Knowing Google, I find it hard to believe that Waze under the Google maps lead will get resources and continue.
> If they intended to maintain it as a separate app, why did the leader of it leave?
You don't have much experience with corporate acquisitions, do you?
The Acquiree CEO always leaves after a year or three, unless Acquirer is a company like Cisco that's really good at it. Why?
Because Acquirer has middle manager drones, who continually complain about the how Acquiree is not "aligning with our strategy." Eventually, Acquiree's CEO gets sick of it and quits.
But you're right - they won't maintain it as a separate app. Because those drones can wear anyone out.
They won't. I was in Google Maps. They bought Zagat -- remember them? They had the best restaurant reviews in the U.S. pre-Internet. How much have you heard of them lately
Zagat was a loss. But it was also basically a creature of a different era when foodies filled out paper surveys and the results were a pretty decent guide for other foodies. Once it was opened up to the plebes, the results got increasingly bad for that audience as everything got more and more algorithmic. (And, yes, it sort of hung on for a while but it deteriorated more and more.)
Not sure what Google ultimately got out of Zagat rather than maybe a bit of kickstart for restaurant ratings.
My dad, who was an executive at a large non-tech company, used to get restaurant recommendations by calling the restaurant critic at the city's newspaper. Different times in a much less scalable world.
>The company has too many employees and the cost per employee is too high.
>Headcount is too high.
>... the business could be operated more effectively with significantly fewer employees.
Yeah, cash-hungry hedge fund calling for layoffs. Got it. Yet here's an excerpt from the WSJ article on this restructuring:
>Google said it planned to maintain Waze as a stand-alone service and didn’t plan to conduct any layoffs as part of the reorganization.