Google has announced that it will merge teams working on the mapping service Waze and its Google Maps portfolio, with the aim of consolidating processes. Google acquired Waze back in 2013 for $1.3 billion, but it largely left the company with full independence, operating under a separate application and brand.
The tech giant says that this will continue with the 500 Waze employees being integrated into the Geo division which consists of Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View. No layoffs are expected at Waze, except for the departure of CEO Neha Parikh after a transition period.
“Google remains deeply committed to Waze’s unique brand, its beloved app and its thriving community of volunteers and users. By bringing the Waze team into Geo’s portfolio of real-world mapping products, like Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View, the teams will benefit from further increased technical collaboration,” reads part of Google’s statement.
While Waze served an impressive 151 million users each month, it is nowhere near the volume that Google Maps handles monthly of more than 1 billion people. When the previous Waze CEO Noam Bardin left the company two years ago, he said that this was not a coincidence, as Google preferred treating Waze as a breeding ground for ideas. He claimed that every idea they came up with was quickly adopted by Google Maps.
Bardin adds that with more involved support from Google, Waze could have seen more significant growth and even hints that being acquired by Google hindered their growth. “The Android app store treated us as a third-party application. There were no pre-installations on devices and no further distribution. We had a much larger marketing budget, but we were limited in what we could do and the third parties we could work with because of corporate policy. All of Waze’s post-acquisition growth came from work we did, not from mothership support. Looking back, we could probably grow much faster and much more efficiently if we had remained independent,” says Noam Bardin
For Google, using Waze to develop new ideas before integrating them into Google Maps with significantly more users was a no-brainer and makes business sense. Back in September, however, Google CEO Sundar Pichai pledged to make the company 20% more productive by running on “fewer resources” amid pressure from different quotas to reduce costs. Merging overlapping products like Waze and Google Maps is one effective way of doing so.
