Google offers 'voluntary' buyouts to hardware and platform teams

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/31/google-offers-voluntary-buyouts-to-hardware-and-platform-teams.html

5 5 1 year ago

dang• 1 year ago

Google offers 'voluntary exit' to all US platforms and devices employees - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42893463 - Jan 2025 (41 comments)

contingencies2• 1 year ago

Fair enough, did look for a similar subject before posting. Not a great deal of insightful discussion for such a major move.

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42880529

SavageBeast• 1 year ago

This is the playbook of a company moving from "Growth" to "Maturity". Of note:

In August 2024, Alphabet announced a quarterly dividend of $0.20 per share, totaling $0.80 annually, resulting in a dividend yield of approximately 0.39%

At current that would mean Alphabet's annual dividend payout is approximately $9.8112 billion.

Now the game is to pay that dividend, incentivize people to hold the stock and reduce volatility. A dividend stock company behaves very differently than a growth stock company.

Whats really frightening here is that a company like Google looks into the future and sees bad prospects for growth.

contingencies2• 1 year ago

My take (launched Samsung Galaxy device series in the US, did work for Nokia/HTC/LG/etc.)... the ad business was always based on attention dominance through search.

Android has performed its primary function - preventing the exclusive dominance of mobile including operator relations by Apple, which threatened Google's attention dominance.

Chrome the platform (minimal cloud-oriented laptop OS) has gone nowhere.

Fitbit (wearable fitness monitor) is a dead leading product in a dead market in an era of smart watches. We had one free and never used it.

Nest (smart home controller) has filled its niche, the 'smart home' never eventuated, most people are happy flicking a light switch once a day and living without remote-accessible CCTV with doorbell integration.

Pixel (Google phone) was only ever a US product.

The problem now for Google is AI is a better search engine. Google's search business is dead unless they upgrade their offering immediately. They get one chance at this (at least, rolling upgrades for <12 months). If they screw up, the company's value will deflate rapidly.

Crystal balling, I would see through this a cashflow freeze also for Alphabet hardware plays like Wing which seem to be bloated operations with multinational presence and no revenue stream, and mutually inconsistent messaging (re. building "aircraft library" vs. "specific aircraft required for specific cargo due to physics" vs. biggest headline partner = Walmart = highly varied cargo requirement).

Google offers 'voluntary' buyouts to hardware and platform teams

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