Recession Takes a Toll on Google and Executives Step Down

The recession officially takes a toll on Google. The Mountain View company was predicting that the current economic downturn may hit them. The cost cutting measures were on the chart especially like by making a heck of lay off and terminating some services in recent times. But as the results come out, Google’s revenue, almost all of which comes from advertisements placed next to related search results, rose 6% from a year earlier but slipped 3% from the fourth quarter. Something around $ 4 Billion was take home profit for Google. Though Google’s slowdown in the advertising sector is looking good considering other companines in average are going to have a 5-5.5% downfall, another thing that concerns Google is the top executives have started stepping down.

Its started with Tim Armstrong, Latin America sales chief Gonzalo Alonso, and Asia-Pacific and Latin America operations president Sukhinder Singh Cassidy in the last two months. Now as the major news comes in, Omid Kordestani, perhaps better known as its business founder, has also decided to call it quits.

As Venturebeat interviewed Alonso, the real picture came in,

You lose the sense of empowerment and flexibility; your decisions have less impact. The company has changed a lot in the last three years. The way to develop products and implement decisions has to pass through a lot more layers.

If you remember well, the chief web-designer of Google also stepped down because he thought Google was agonizingly machinery but human. At this point of time, I hope with all these premier heads gone, Google can still play safe without having to worry too much.

While we will have to keep in mind that perhaps Google is the only company to be progressing and profiting that well even from a bleak recession like this, but as Eric Schmidt said,

The economic environment…remains tough. Google absolutely feels the impact.