Google Adding To Nation's Unemployment FiguresAs Originally Posted to Mercury News
Google announced Thursday that it is trimming just under 200 positions from its sales and marketing operations, or about 1 percent of its global work force.
"Google has grown very quickly in a very short period of time," sales chief Omid Kordestani wrote in an unusually candid post on the company's official blog. "When companies grow that quickly it's almost impossible to get everything right — and we certainly didn't."
The layoffs represent the latest round of cuts at the Mountain View Internet powerhouse. As the economy has slowed, Google has throttled back on expenses. In January, Google cut its recruiting department by about 100 positions. In February, about 40 Googlers were let go when the company stopped selling audio ads. Google has also laid off more than a thousand contractors. The company has 20,222 employees. In a research note published Thursday, Jim Friedland, an analyst at Cowen and Co., said advertisers at a recent conference in New York said advertising budgets for paid search — Google's bread and butter — were either down or flat in the first quarter. Rob Sanderson, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, downgraded Google last week to neutral, citing a slowdown in "monetization," in other words, advertising sales. "We still like Google longer term and will return to the stock," Sanderson wrote. But he added that in the near term, expectations for Google's growth this year were too high. In his blog post, Kordestani said he was laying off salespeople because the company had over-invested in preparation for growth that has petered out in some areas.
