Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as “cheaper” labour, the report claimed.
Google’s death spiral will take a while but it’s clearly circle the drain.
It will likely never completely die the same way IBM never died but it will stop being the desired placed for new graduates.
The fundamental problem with these businesses is that they are Too Big To Fail. Which is to say, they’ll have a low-interest line of credit and enormous historic revenue streams that carry them decades past what should be an expiration date.
If a better Search Engine pops up, Google can either buy them out or vexatiously litigate them into the ground. If they start losing ground to Microsoft or Facebook, their treasury can simply hedge the losses by purchasing their rivals’ stock. If they face an outside challenger - a ByteDance or a Pinstorm - they can lobby the Feds to lock out the competition or buffer their weak sales by winning more federal contracts from the PRISM program.
And, in the end, they’ll always have their IP. Decades of accumulated “we developed a special coding technique for pressing a button, so now you owe us money any time you press a button” basic legacy infrastructure that everyone else will be forced to license by a captured judiciary/regulatory body.
Like GE and Walt Disney and Authentic Brands Group, they don’t actually have to make anything in the end. They can reap tens of billions of dollars by collecting rents on the company legacy.
Just zombie firms feasting on the brains of smaller businesses and retail customers forever and ever and ever.
- Pichai ignores the fact that part of the reason the pay is so well at Big Tech is that they’re paying you to not have ethics. His failure to understand that is gonna seriously hurt Google.
- Looking for cheaper labor… in Germany? Where worker protections are WAY stronger than in the US? Lol. (That’s not a shot at Germany. That’s commentary on American labor protections, or lack thereof).
European salaries for software developers are half of what they are in the USA. It’s a problem on both sides of the Atlantic, honestly.
Source: software developer in Europe who usually works for American companies.
Be that as it may, Europeans don’t have to live with the constant fact that they might just lay you off today due to “staffing optimization” and there’s absolutely fuck-all you can do about it.
Honestly he’s doing a great job of slowly killing the company.
