As Google prepares for what it believes can be worsening financial circumstances, one of many first public casualties of its cost-cutting measures seems to be its laptop computer division answerable for the corporate’s flagship Pixelbook {hardware}.
The Verge is reporting that individuals acquainted with the matter are confirming that Google has “canceled the following model of its Pixelbook laptop computer and dissolved the group answerable for constructing it.”
The information follows Alphabet (Google) CEO Sundar Pichai’s worker memo that defined a decelerate on hiring on the firm in addition to different cost-cutting measures enacted to arrange for economically unsure instances.
Due to the hiring progress achieved thus far this yr, we’ll be slowing the tempo of hiring for the remainder of the yr, whereas nonetheless supporting our most essential alternatives. For the steadiness of 2022 and 2023, we’ll focus our hiring on engineering, technical and different crucial roles, and ensure the good expertise we do rent is aligned with our long-term priorities.
Transferring ahead, we have to be extra entrepreneurial, working with higher urgency, sharper focus, and extra starvation than we have proven on sunnier days. In some instances, meaning consolidating the place investments overlap and streamlining processes. In different instances, meaning pausing improvement and re-deploying sources to increased precedence areas. Making the corporate extra environment friendly is as much as all of us — we’ll be creating extra methods for you all to have interaction and share concepts to assist, so keep tuned.
Apparently sufficient the brand new Pixelbook information comes after a number of quarters of declining Chromebook gross sales in its largest market, North America. Main as much as the pandemic, gross sales of Chromebooks had been trickling upwards and with many academics and colleges positioned below quarantine, the setting for low-cost laptops and academic software program catapulted Chromebooks into the first or 2nd positions of gadgets bought for a fast minute.
Sadly for Chromebooks, life is slowly going again to a brand new regular and the accelerated gross sales path of the low-cost laptops have since puttered out.
Whereas it might solely be tangential, Google pulling the plug on this yr’s Pixelbook in addition to dissolving the group looks as if a mirrored image of market realities for the corporate.
The Pixelbook division gave the impression to be much less constant and extra confused than its smartphone counterpart, the place {hardware} releases had been years aside, design languages switched with every launch and as a result of working system, fewer standout options had been highlighted.
On the finish of the day, Google makes software program and sometimes some {hardware}, however its experience resides in algorithms and improvement. Just like Microsoft, Google’s Chromebook legacy relies on the software program and providers it offers to third social gathering {hardware} makers.
Whereas the Pixelbook might not be a continued endeavor at Google, there can be loads of producers creating {hardware} designs primarily based on the working system developed and supplied by the corporate, we’ll simply have to attend and see if Google decides to re-enter the market sooner or later with a brand new imaginative and prescient for ChromeOS on {hardware}.
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