Google has slashed its consumer product workforce, cutting hundreds of jobs and combining divisions into a more unified workforce.
Gone are the separate Pixel, Nest and Fitbit divisions which saw development of phones, smart home devices and wearables siloed.
The cutbacks were first reported by 9to5google.com and include the departure of Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman who came across to Google after it acquired their company for US$2.1 billion in 2019.
According to 9to5google.com, the previously separate teams will operate as one, sharing staff organised around their functions, such as hardware engineering.
“It remains to be seen whether this will lead to more unified products across the different form factors, with the Pixel phone team largely staying in place today from what we’ve heard,” the publication says.
Google’s augmented reality team has been especially impacted, which suggests that in future, it might concentrate on providing support to other AR hardware manufacturers rather than develop alone.
“A few hundred roles are being eliminated in DSPA with the majority of impacts on the 1P AR Hardware team,” Google says in a statement.
“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.”
This isn’t the first recent rationalisation at Google. Last year, Google’s parent Alphabet merged its Brain and DeepMind teams to consolidate its AI push after it appeared to fall behind in its development of Generative AI.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin was brought back to assist with the development of its artificial intelligence platform.
