Summary
- Google is restructuring its organization and laying off employees in the AR department, focusing on product partnerships instead of building its own AR hardware.
- Fitbit co-founders and team members are also leaving, and there will be one team responsible for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit going forward.
- Google is slowing down its investment in AR, while Apple is preparing to launch its own XR headset. Google is more interested in AI and just launched its most advanced language model.
Google is restructuring parts of its organization once again, a report says. The company is laying off a number of employees in the AR department. Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are also leaving the company along with other Fitbit team members.
The details come as part of a report from 9to5Google, with Google confirming to the publication that the layoffs are indeed happening. The company said, “A few hundred roles are being eliminated in DSPA with the majority of impacts on the 1P AR Hardware team. While we are making changes to our 1P AR hardware team, Google continues to be deeply committed to other AR initiatives, such as AR experiences in our products, and product partnerships.”
Google Glass in action
The statement makes clear why these decisions were taken. It looks like going forward, the company wants to focus on its product partnerships rather than building its own AR products, like it did in the past with the now-discontinued Google Glass or the shuttered follow-up “Iris” project. 9to5Google says that the statement is a direct reference to its partnership with Samsung, with the two companies wanting to build a XR headset. According to the statement, the company also continues to be committed to AR within its software, like with pedestrian navigation in Google Maps.
Regarding Fitbit, the move is similar to what Google did when it bought Nest back in 2014. Google slowly transitioned the originally siloed-off hardware from Nest into its own product lineup, and along the process, it also reorganized its smart home team. With the Fitbit personnel change, something similar is happening. 9to5Google says that there will only be one team responsible for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit going forward, with a single lead at the helm.
2024 isn’t looking so different from 2023 for Google
In a sense, 2024 is starting similarly to 2023 for Google, when the company announced mass layoffs affecting 12,000 jobs, representing about 6% of its workforce. Projects like Fuchsia saw the biggest hit back then, with the company cutting about 65 positions in the team of roughly 400 people. Further down the line, this lead to Google abandoning its plans to update all of its smart home devices to the new OS.
This time around, the restructuring and layoffs affect far fewer people. In Fitbit’s case, they seem mostly concerned with cutting redundancies and streamlining the product development process, though we can only hope that the Fitbit transition continues to be less of a mess than the one Nest was and still is.
As for AR, it seems like Google is deciding to slow down investment just when Apple is getting ready to launch its own XR headset next month, the Vision Pro. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon or trying to compete with a product of its own, Google seems content with leaving the playing field to Samsung and Apple, merely standing by as a software partner for the former. Instead, Google is much more interested in AI, with the company just recently launching its most advanced large language model yet, Gemini.
Source link
