Google Cancels Half the Projects At Its Internal R&D Group Area 120 (techcrunch.com) 41
TechCrunch has learned and Google confirmed the company is slashing projects at its in-house R&D division known as Area 120. From the report: The company on Tuesday informed staff of a "reduction in force" which will see the incubator halved in size, as half the teams working on new product innovations heard their projects were being canceled. Previously, there were 14 projects housed in Area 120, and this has been cut down to just seven. Employees whose projects will not continue were told they'll need to find a new job within Google by the end of January 2023, or they'll be terminated. It's not clear that everyone will be able to do so. According to Area 120 lead Elias Roman, the division aims to sharpen its focus to only AI-first projects, as opposed to its earlier mandate to fuel product incubation across all of Google.
Over the years, the division has launched a number of successful products, including the HTML5 gaming platform GameSnacks, now integrated with Google Chrome; an AirTable rival called Tables which exited to Google Cloud; an A.I.-powered conversational ads platform AdLingo, which also exited to Cloud; video platforms Tangi and Shoploop, which exited to Google Search and Shopping, respectively; the web-based travel app Touring Bird, which exited to Commerce; and a technical interview platform Byteboard, a rare external spinout. One of the projects now being cut with the changes is Qaya, a service offering web storefronts for digital creators, launched late last year.
The other six projects being canceled weren't yet launched, but included a financial accounting project for Google Sheets, another shopping-related product, analytics for AR/VR, and, unfortunately, three climate-related projects. These latter projects had focused on EV car charging maps with routing, carbon accounting for I.T., and carbon measurement of forests. Google confirmed the changes in a statement to TechCrunch: "Area 120 is an in-house incubator for experimental new products. The group regularly starts and stops projects with an eye toward pursuing the most promising opportunities. We've recently shared that Area 120 will be shifting its focus to projects that build on Google's deep investment in AI and have the potential to solve important user problems. As a result, Area 120 is winding down several projects to make way for new work. Impacted team members will receive dedicated support as they explore new projects and opportunities at Google."
Over the years, the division has launched a number of successful products, including the HTML5 gaming platform GameSnacks, now integrated with Google Chrome; an AirTable rival called Tables which exited to Google Cloud; an A.I.-powered conversational ads platform AdLingo, which also exited to Cloud; video platforms Tangi and Shoploop, which exited to Google Search and Shopping, respectively; the web-based travel app Touring Bird, which exited to Commerce; and a technical interview platform Byteboard, a rare external spinout. One of the projects now being cut with the changes is Qaya, a service offering web storefronts for digital creators, launched late last year.
The other six projects being canceled weren't yet launched, but included a financial accounting project for Google Sheets, another shopping-related product, analytics for AR/VR, and, unfortunately, three climate-related projects. These latter projects had focused on EV car charging maps with routing, carbon accounting for I.T., and carbon measurement of forests. Google confirmed the changes in a statement to TechCrunch: "Area 120 is an in-house incubator for experimental new products. The group regularly starts and stops projects with an eye toward pursuing the most promising opportunities. We've recently shared that Area 120 will be shifting its focus to projects that build on Google's deep investment in AI and have the potential to solve important user problems. As a result, Area 120 is winding down several projects to make way for new work. Impacted team members will receive dedicated support as they explore new projects and opportunities at Google."
What if they threw a recession (Score:3, Interesting)
The people who run the show, the people who tell you and me what to do, really really want a recession right now because they want to pay us less and make us work longer hours and we've been making gains in both working conditions and pay. They're desperate to turn back the tides on that.
But so far nothing they've tried has worked. Normally getting their buddies in the FED to raise interest rates is guaranteed the cause of recession. But nope no recession. I suppose it helps that we've got decades and decades of infrastructure spending that we no longer have a choice on. Forget the green New deal we at least have to do something about the collapsing Bridges before they kill so many people it becomes noticeable.
Plus the boomers are at their limit. They just can't not retire. Ignoring age discrimination a lot of them are well over 60 and physically can't work anymore. Plus covid knocked out a million people and continues to kill around 500 a day. In a country like America where you work until you drop when people start to drop that has an impact
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Cool, can't wait to accrue interest on my savings account.
Re: What if they threw a recession (Score:1, Insightful)
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Not worth using mod points on, but close. Well done.
Re:What if they threw a recession (Score:5, Insightful)
Recession is here, driven primarily by the factor we knew about for last fourty years. We knew it was coming some time between 2022 and 2024 in... 1980. Because it's driven by demographics. Those are the years when boomer generations retire en mass in both Northern America and Western Europe. That means massive loss of productive capacity and know how from losing all the highly qualified, highly value added, highly experienced employees, with next generation not having anywhere near the numbers needed to replace them.
And rapid loss of workforce productivity means that you get a few things. First you get inflation, because you are forced to rebuild much of supply chain for everything to require less work force, all while trying to pay smaller workforce enough to keep them on... while overall production is going down. More and more money competing for buying power on less and less product. Boom, inflation that cannot be controlled through money supply end. FED, ECB etc are helpless, because their tools are aimed at society where workforce is not rapidly shedding it's most valuable employees. Raising interest rates constrains inflation that comes from economy being too good.
It does the opposite to economy that is tanking due to shrinking workforce, because retooling of production needed to make it less human labor dependent needs capital, and raising interest rates makes said capital less accessible for such efforts. It actually makes inflation like this worse rather than better. This is why you have FED and ECB both being utterly terrified right now, desperately crunching the numbers on how much of the inflation is of the kind they can impact positively with raising interest rates, and how much of it is of the kind that will be impacted negatively.
Key takeaway is: we still don't know, which means that when people demand that "something" is done, all they can do is raise interest rates and hope for the best.
The reason why it's coming this hard however is from stupidity of Western and Chinese treatment of the pandemic, where we basically burned two years of time we had to try to adapt to the upcoming generational upheaval and entire generation of upcoming youth on the altar of letting grandma with two failed kidneys survive the winter to be taken out by normal influenza instead of covid. That is a demographic debt we'll be paying for a very long time, and it's going to make all recessions in next two to four decades worse because youth currently in school has effectively lost between a year and a half to two and a half years of productive study time. And grandma still died of flu a year later. But as stupid as that was, what Chinese are doing is even worse. They're still using mass lockdowns to try to handle the ongoing pandemic, which means that they are getting amputated from global supply chains chunk by chunk due to unreliability as a supplier of anything mission critical. Be it a small part needed to assemble a car, or having a part of a team developing software. And that's a lot of productive capacity that is randomly going offline at the same time as West has the aforementioned demographic catastrophe unfolding, so that's one heck of a double whammy.
And finally, there's the third Russo-German divorce, which looks to end up somewhat less awful than previous two. Hopefully. We're still on the fence about that one.
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No, you went from booming economy where pre and post retirement age boomers were still working en masse because they didn't quite know how pandemic is going to go to one where they retired en masse because they saw massive liquidity injections drive their investments into stratosphere.
Doesn't matter if you get Brandon, Orange Man or Florida Man for next term. They can't create several million experienced workers to replace the gap left by retiring boomers.
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Refined hydrocarbons went up mainly due to full scale implementation of ESG in large scale financing, which resulted in halving of investment into refining hydrocarbons about five years.
Which resulted in slow degradation of refining capacity globally, and pandemic shrank demand for two and a half years concealing the rapidly growing decrease in refining capacity. So when we came out, we found out that we're massively short on refining capacity. Result is that while oil itself is much cheaper than it used to
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How are you going to power trucks?
How are you going to get nuclear reactors allowed in civilian harbours worldwide?
Until you answer those two question, your narrative is the Cult of Gaia anti-reality nonsense. And it's because we don't have those answers is why in spite of all the doomsaying you just regurgitated and silly propaganda about "future is this way, and everyone knows it", oil demand was, is and remains inelastic. Because logistics power everything, and oil powers logistics.
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Notice how you didn't answer the question in that desperate spamming of red herrings.
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Boomers have been retiring for at a steady rate for the last 10 years, there is no sudden mass retirement. Inflation is caused by adding more money than GDP to the economy and increase in underlying costs, mostly energy. Both of these are the result of government policy.
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I understand the need to desperately pretend that there's something that government can do to the point of denying reality on the ongoing mass retirement event and its interaction with the pandemic and pandemic relief effort related soaring of retirement funds (other than the ESG/refining capacity related issues with refined hydrocarbons). It's very human to believe ourselves omnipotent.
But there's very little in terms of tools that government has to address this. There's nothing any government can do to co
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Man, that was a sick burn. You can go to sleep proud of yourself.
Just as much as your parents go to sleep ashamed of you.
COVID knocked a *lot* of them out (Score:2)
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"World"? Yes.
"Western world"? No. Retirement funds alone as the single biggest category of institutional investors in the world right now. And they only cover a small portion of retirement savings in the West.
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The boomers who retire do not have the same jobs they started with.
Most physical work is low-payed and has been exported to the East and we got service jobs like management, accounting and marketing in return.
Lots of Americans have to have 2 jobs to pay the bills, not because there's too much jobs. If there were, wages would have increased.
And covid has been deadly to many groups, obesitas, diabetes and people with weak disposition.
It's this growth that's responsible for the issues, not demographics. We
You keep saying that (Score:2)
High levels of education are making up for the productivity losses as is automation. The only problem is sharing that wealth. The rich don't want to, so they want a recession to put you and me back in our place.
Big deal (Score:3)
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I hang out at Area 15 to watch dyslexic aliens. More parking space also.
Good. Cancellation before release is fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Regularly announcing projects and then cancelling them after a year or more is an outrageous waste of other people's time and money.
Let's hope Google have finally stopped doing the latter. Before we all hate and avoid working with them on anything.
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R&D costs money and doesn't have a guaranteed return on investment.
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Good. The beancounters are what killed Douglas and are now hard at work killing Boeing.
Beancounters have ruined plenty of other formerly-outstanding companies too.
if they kill Google, I will dance on their grave while chugging from a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck. I can't think of a more manipulative company this side of Facebook and Twitter.
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An honorary up-vote!
Re: But they *identify* as employed by Google (Score:2)
Never heard of projects they released (Score:2)
A sign in shift of priorities? (Score:1)