Google is preparing for an economic slowdown and is showing a much more conservative attitude than that adopted by Steve Jobs for Apple in his time.
The global economic crisis is not sparing any sector of activity and new technologies must face up to the repercussions now.
Google prepares its employees for a hiring freeze in the coming months
Sundar Pichai, CEO of the Alphabet group, parent company of Google, sent a memo to his teams to reveal his action plan to prepare for the economic slowdown that the company will have to face in the coming weeks.
The leader indicates that Google will return to its entrepreneurial roots and focus on certain ongoing projects, even if it means putting other less strategic ones on hold over the next few months.
Sundar Pichai also clarified that hiring would be slowed down for the next 18 months:
” Due to the hiring progress made so far this year, we will slow the pace of hiring for the remainder of the year, while supporting our most important opportunities. For the remainder of 2022 and 2023, the company will focus on hiring for engineering, technical and other critical roles “.
Google is following in the footsteps of other Silicon Valley companies like Meta, which recently announced a hiring freeze to deal with the crisis.
Steve Jobs preferred to take advantage of crises to invest in R&D
Google’s strategy therefore looks very conservative. The company will tighten the screws and reduce its expenses as much as possible while waiting for better days. This rational philosophy, however, was not shared by another big name in global tech, Steve Jobs.
In the early 2000s, Apple had to face the bursting of the internet bubble which affected all technology stocks. If many companies have chosen austerity, Jobs had adopted a completely different strategy by investing even more than before the start of the crisis.
“What I said to our company was that we were just going to invest to get through the crisis, that we weren’t going to lay people off, that we had worked hard to get them into Apple in the first place. – the last thing we were going to do was fire them. And we were going to keep funding. In fact, we were going to increase our R&D budget in order to be ahead of our competition when the recession was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. »
This strategy actually paid off since at the same time, Apple introduced the iPod, an audio player that would fill the company’s coffers for many years.
It remains to be seen whether Sundar Pichai, by playing the card of caution, will also experience the same success in the coming years.
Source : WebproNews
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