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Big Tech Lay-offs, Winter 2023
Jan 20th, 2023 by miki

So, recession is here making local and global companies alike feel the heat. Changes in consumer behaviour affects especially the global tech companies very quickly because of the way they have almost completely gobbled up all marketing spending of every seller and reseller with any digital outlet presence.

As the digital advertising chain is decoupled from anything physical this ripples from consumer spending to impacting big tech revenue with immense speed. This, of course will affect how these companies use their resources, and the workforce needed to run their businesses.

To try to quantify what is happening to global tech companies’ workforce, I’ve collected some numbers and below is a chart illustrating the announced lay-offs in nine prominent big tech companies as of 2023-01-20. On this day, Google announced their reduction of 12’000 “roles” which triggered me to look into this.

Note some trends;

  • the lower headcounts, the higher relative lay-offs
    suggesting that bigger companies have equity and willingness to opt keeping more of the workforce/knowledge
  • Tesla and Cisco seems to have chosen a different strategy as their ratio a considerably lower than similar sized companies
    Tesla’s reluctance to lay-off hourly paid production workers (suggestion that production is regarded as a more severe bottleneck than development) is probably a factor in this

Download spread sheet in ODS format

Numbers and Sources

Lay-off Summaries

Google Play; no interaction with policy breaking app provider
Aug 8th, 2012 by miki

When dealing with policy enforcement for products that you distribute from business partners and whose sales your organization directly profits from, you’d think that you’d want to engage in some kind of communication with your peers before making drastic moves like shutting down distribution of these products. Especially when your peer is a national lottery organization partly owned by a European state, who is strictly professional about their business and which probably has a non-significant turnover facilitated by the product.

Well, if your are Google and runs the Google Play software distribution system for the Android platform, you apparently couldn’t care less. At least that is what a move today by Google implies, when banning an Android gaming app by Danske Spil, the national Danish lottery, who has a governement enforced monopoly on lottery in Denmark. This was done without any interaction with Danske Spil which of course was taken by surprise when realizing this, as reported (GTrans) by Danish tech magazine Version2.

Admittedly, as it stands now from an objective point of view, the app clearly breaks the content policy of Google Play which states that “We don’t allow content or services that facilitate online gambling”. So the real question, apart from the peculiar  behaviour of Google towards this app provider for Google Play, is for Danske Spil; “How on earth did you think you could distribute an app through Google Play which so blatantly is in direct violation of the content policy?”.

Maybe the endorsement by the Danish legislation has risen to their heads, making them think their monoploy in Denmark made them so special that they could ignore Google’s standard policies? The current response from Danske Spil is that the app had been previously “approved” by Google, whatever that means because to my knowledge there is no verification procedure as such for content on Google Play (that’s a point for further investigation when time permits) .

At the moment not only the app itself, but also the provider page for Danske Spil A/S is inaccessible at Google Play, even though marketing from Danske Spil still tries to lure new users to the lotteries provided by the app, both from the web, TV and electronic billboards.

If your business model relies on outside partners (and which doesn’t?), this might be a good occasion to take the time for a second thought about what dependencies it has. And especially who is in the power to pull the carpet below it without interacting with you.

If I had a business with parts, components or services not under my in complete control, I’d prefer a partner which had a fellow human representing him, with which I could meet and look into his eyes. That way a social bond is created, which hopefully increases the probability that I will know if anything is about to happen that affects my business.

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© 2023 Mikkel Kirkgaard Nielsen, contents CC BY-SA 4.0