+44 (0)20 7930 4158POPULAR TOOLS
Google cancels staff trip to Disneyland
Google is reportedly cancelling a staff trip to Disneyland in an effort to cut costs as the recession begins to take its toll on the world’s biggest search engine. The news comes three months after Google cut 200 staff from its sales and marketing teams in the most significant round of redundancies it has made this year.
Google’s annual staff holiday started as a winter ski trip for its US employees. However, it said last year that due to the size of the company, it would no longer take workers skiing. Instead, it took its staff on a three-day excursion to Disneyland, providing them with private access to the theme park for five hours one evening. Google workers were allowed to use the rides without queuing before enjoying a private firework display.
Google is famed for providing its staff with perks such as a subsidised canteen and in-house swimming pool at its Californian headquarters. However, this may be set to change, as news that Google is cancelling its 2009 trip follows a number of cost-cutting exercises by the search giant. In March it cut 200 staff, claiming this would cut down on overlap between departments and ease decision-making among its sales and marketing teams. In January, Google also cut 100 recruitment staff, claiming this reflected a slowdown in its hiring policy.
Also in January, Google announced it was closing various product units in an effort to cut costs and focus on profitable business areas. Among the closures was the shutdown of mobile social network Dodgeball. The search engine also cut app-building tool Mashup Editor and its Google Catalogue Search tool, which lets users browse the text from thousands of product catalogues.
Google has continued to innovate in other areas, including the recent launch of Google Wave, a project which Google claims could revolutionise online communications by combining email, instant messaging and file sharing into a seamless interface.
In April, Google announced a 9% year-on-year rise in Q1 profits, illustrating the resilience of the firm’s business model in the face of a difficult online ad market. However, its revenues are down 3% compared to the preceding quarter, indicating that it is not immune from the effects of tightening budgets.
Google was not immediately available to give comment on the status of its staff holiday.
