Are Cuts at Google Anything to Worry About?

“Last week, Google announced that the company was unceremoniously discontinuing or at least ceasing development of a number of services it had launched or acquired in the past, including Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball and The Mashup Editor. The shutdown of the latter two was announced on the Google Code blog by VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, along with some explanation regarding microblogging Jaiku, which many tech blogs and news outlets reported was merely being kept alive without further plans for the Twitteresque service.”

                                                                                                                                -Washington Post, 1/17/09

Ok, what does that mean for you? It’s easy to feel jittery these days, what with the economy being in its current untenable state. And the news lately has been loaded with concrete evidence that there aren’t many parts of the economy that aren’t connected with one another, so when one of the biggest technology based companies on earth starts cutting things out of the budget, you have to wonder if this will come back on you.

Will Google start charging people to get listed? Will this cost us money?

It is highly doubtful. In the first place, take a look at what Google is getting rid of. Google Video is redundant considering that they now own YouTube. And will not being able to use “The Mashup Editor” really affect the practice of your law firm? Probably not.

Google’s bread and butter is the search engine business, and all of these cuts are based on either eliminating redundancies or simply conceding the ground to technologies that are already dominating a particular niche.

There is certainly a great deal to worry about with the economy, but a few cuts at Google are certainly not something to concern yourself with.