Even Google begins layoffs
Even Google is not secure from the downturns on the economy. This week it announced the discontinuation of its virtual world service called Lively. Lively was launched with a lot of fanfare earlier this month, but quickly lost traction with the crowd. I personally only checked it out once. Google does give a reason for why it is shutting down the service on its own blog here. Here’s the gist of this reason:
It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.
Well, that is a fair enough reason for shutting down the service. After all everyone is cutting costs, and though I am pretty sure no one at Google lost their job as a result of this shutdown, but I think I would still think of this as a Layoff from Google’s point of view.