Google Says Goodbye to 200 Googlers

Despite being an almighty company, Google was not spared by the on-going economic crisis. And no matter how much Google tries to explain that the announced lay-offs of around 200 Google employees worldwide is an offshoot of overlapping work areas - it can’t hide the fact that the ultimate reason for this lay-off is of course the economic crisis.So the affected areas will be in Google’s Sales and Marketing Division scattered worldwide. There will be around 200 employees who will be saying goodbye to their lucrative employment as a Googler. Google promises to help those who will be affected to find other employment within Google as well as give severance pays to them.

The announcement was made by Omid Kordestani, Senior VP, Global Sales and Business Development:

"So today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organizations by just under 200 globally. Making changes of this kind is never easy—and we recognize that the recession makes the timing even more difficult for the Googlers concerned. We did look at a number of different options but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organizations in order to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a business. We will give each person time to try and find another position at Google, as well as outplacement support, and provide severance packages for those who leave the company. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone affected for all they have contributed to Google."


This is the second time that Google has made some measures to cut down on its manpower resources.

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The Gmail “Whoops” Button

Recently added in the Gmail Labs, you can enable the option to “undo” an email you just sent. This is not like the AOL feature that was around 10+ years ago that actually let you retract emails sent to other AOL users, but rather this feature waits 5 seconds before actually sending the e-mail.

So after waiting 5 seconds, it will send your email. So what if you close the browser? It will still send your email even if you close the browser or navigate off the page.

It’s a great safeguard if you immediately realize you sent the email to the wrong person. I have it enabled and might use it from time to time.

You can read more about it here, http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about_whatsnew.html.

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Google Needs to Focus on Business

Google’s official blog is a great resource and a great way for them to get the word out about important news items. But, they also have other blog posts they publish that aren’t exactly on the same track.

Let’s look at the latest blog spot titled “March is for hoops.”

As a big college hoops fan, I’m pretty excited that it’s finally March. Sadly, my beloved Stanford Cardinal didn’t make it to the tourney, but as a proud Arizona native, I still root for my hometown Arizona State Sun Devils. I always go a little crazy — you might even say mad — this time of year. I fill out my bracket, wear a lot of red and gold, and get into arguments with friends of mine from the UofA. I’m a little obsessed.

If you’re like me, then I have some good news for you. We have several products that can help you follow the tournament.

• Live scores when you search for your favorite team
• An iGoogle gadget for following the action
• Breaking news on all the tournament excitement on Google News
• Local search to find a spot to watch the game

To get you started, we put together some helpful tips about using Google to keep up with the Madness. Best of luck to you and your team! Unless, of course, they’re playing ASU. ;-)

Thank you for wasting 3 minutes of my life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge HUGE fan of college hoops and particularly March Madness, but did you really need to make an official post about this? This kind of blog post should be done on your personal blog, not on the Google blog.

Sure, I’ll even look at it from the side of “Google is personable and friendly, and real,” but at the same time, I also have to look at it that they have hundreds and thousands of subscribers that subscribe for the latest Google news, not hearing about someone’s craze over March Madness.

Sorry if this post sounds a little “rant-ish” to you, but I needed to put it out there that Google needs to focus on Google stuff, not the personal lives of their employees. This is why they have Blogger, so employees can go make their own blog.

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Google Chrome Extensions

Google’s Chrome browser is still prepping for extensions. It really should have launched with extensions in the first place, along with a Mac and Linux version, but hey, life isn’t perfect and neither is Google.

Here are some excerpts about how to use extensions within Chrome.

Create a folder somewhere on your computer to contain your work. For discussion, we’ll assume the folder is located a c:\myextension, but it can be anywhere.

Inside this folder, create a text file called manifest.json and put this in it:

1.{

2. "format_version": 1,

3. "id": "00123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456",

4. "version": "1.0",

5. "name": "My First Extension",

6. "description": "The first extension that I made."

7.}

Then, to launch extensions, use a command line this.

1.chrome.exe --enable-extensions --load-extension="c:\myextension"

Google’s Chrome is getting more and more serious about it’s establishment in the market.

On one of my non-tech sites, I see IE is still sitting at 63% usage and Google Chrome is up to 1.34% usage. It’s still a small market share, but it’s creeping up slowly and definitely taking a stand.

What is the number one thing I love about Chrome over IE, FF, Safari, or Opera? How fast the JavaScript engine is. It is a killer component and is definitely something that Google is pimping out as a huge feature.

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