Tomorrow, December 9, the transition will begin to carry out the merger of the team behind the Waze application within the team behind the geographic navigation applications Google Maps, Google Earth and Street Video, according to the Wall Street Journal. .
Despite the merger, Google does not expect to lay off any workers, where the current 500 Waze employees will be integrated into Google’s team dedicated to navigation applications. With the transition complete, Neha Parikh, the current CEO of Waze, will step down.
There are no plans from Google either to merge both applications, which will remain independent, since Google wants to continue to keep the Waze brand and the collaborative application for drivers alive.
According to the aforementioned publication:
Google said it planned to keep Waze as a separate service and did not plan to make any layoffs as part of the reorganization.
Waze will remain a standalone app
In this sense, it should be noted that Waze has enjoyed full autonomy within Google, maintaining its own culture, since it was acquired by the search giant in 2013 for just over a billion dollars.
As Noam Bardin wrote, after his departure as Waze’s previous CEO in 2021, Google made good on a promise to maintain autonomy.
Now, in the search for greater efficiency and cost reduction, and with the experience of other mergers of areas carried out within Google to avoid overlapping, the new merger will achieve greater technical collaboration between the workers of the resulting area.
Waze currently has more than 151 million monthly active users, being a reference application when it comes to making better decisions about routes based on the circumstances that may occur in the sections through which it was planned to circulate.
Next year will mark a decade since Google acquired Waze, having come a long way as an independent and autonomous application in the face of Google’s corporate culture, and that after the merger will remain independent, despite the fact that some of its functions have gone. integrating over time into other company navigation applications.
More information: WSJ
