Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Google is planning to merge its mapping service Waze team with the team responsible for the company's mapping products to streamline operations and ease growing cost pressures, according to news on December 9.

Google plans to merge its 500-strong Waze team with the company's Geo division responsible for Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View products from Friday, according to a Google spokesman.

Neha Parikh, chief executive of Waze, will leave after a transitional period. A Google spokesman said the company plans to keep Waze as a separate service and does not plan to make any layoffs in the restructuring process.

Google said it expected the restructuring to reduce overlap between Waze and the map product team. In a statement, a Google spokesman said: "Google remains committed to building a unique brand of Waze, continuing to improve popular applications, and supporting a burgeoning community of volunteers and users."

Sandal Pichai, Google's chief executive, has been looking for ways to improve efficiency after advertising growth has slowed this year. In September, Pichai said he wanted Google to be 20% more productive and said the company might merge teams that develop overlapping products.

TCI Fund Management, Google's majority shareholder and activist hedge fund, last month called on Alphabet to slash costs and wrote in a letter to management that the fund thought Google had too many employees.

In 2013, Google bought Waze for $1.1 billion, the fourth largest deal the company made at the time. The acquisition was reviewed by regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which decided not to challenge the deal.

Waze's crowdsourced mapping service, which has 151 million monthly active users, is known for maintaining detailed traffic data. In recent years, Waze has also worked hard to build an advertising business.

After the acquisition, Waze operated largely independently of Google Maps, but Google integrated many of Waze's popular features into its flagship products.

In 2021, Noam Bardin, the chief executive who decided to sell Waze to Google, left the company to start Twitter's rival Post. Barding later wrote a blog post describing the challenges he faced after joining Google, including dissatisfaction with the company's hiring practices and internal bureaucracy.

"even after being acquired by Google, all the growth of Waze came from our own work, not from the support of the parent company," Baldin wrote in a blog post. "in retrospect, if we had stayed independent, we might have grown faster and more efficiently."

Former music technology executive Christopher Phillips (Christopher Phillips) heads the Geo division and will now oversee Waze. Employees of the service had previously reported to Don Harrison, president of Google's global cooperation and corporate development.

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