Google plans to combine teams working on its Maps product and Waze, the mapping service that Google acquired in 2013. The merger comes as the search engine giant feels pressure to cut costs and consolidate operations, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Waze's team of 500 employees will fall under Google's Geo organization, which oversees Maps, Earth and Street View, starting Friday. Neha Parikh, the current CEO of Waze, will step down from her role.
Google told WSJ that it plans to keep Waze as a standalone service: Waze is known for its source of information on the road, such as speed camera locations, police cars, and road kills.
Google also said it did not expect any layoffs as part of the reorganization. Yet layoffs abound in the tech world, whether it's a startup or Amazon. And they often hit the hardest where there are layoffs between teams. In fact, Google said that it hopes that the restructuring of the different map services will reduce the overlap in the creation of maps.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said he hopes to make Google 20% more productive running “with less resources”. At the Code Conference in September, the executive said the company had gotten slower due to overcontracting and seemed to hint that merging teams working on overlapping products would help the company stay on top.
