Google CEO Sundar Pichai appears to be looking to cut costs. After saying in July that the company’s performance was “not where it should be,”Google cut Google’s Hardware laptop division and spun off what was left of Project Loon to try to survive as an independent company. The latest move is aimed at Google’s Area 120 “idea incubator”group, which is halving, according to Bloomberg.
We’ve mentioned this group a few times here on Ars, mostly in connection with the “Google Reply”experiment, which provided quick AI-generated responses to any instant messaging service. The answer was openly called an “experiment”and was a real hack work on the application, but today this feature is a standard part of Android, so it is considered a great success. A project management app called Sheets has been so successful that Google is working on a full-fledged Google Workspace app based on the idea. GameSnacks, an Area 120 HTML5 gaming platform for users in low-bandwidth developing countries, has over 35 million users.
Area 120 was reorganized just a year ago when it was pulled into the newly created division of Google Labs under the leadership of Google veteran Clay Bayvor. The Labs team is doing Google’s work with AR and VR, and they even have a blockchain project. There’s no word on whether any of Google’s other experimental work is being shut down as part of the cost-cutting initiative, but it looks like this sort of news is now coming in at a fairly robust pace.