Google is an ad company, pure and simple. In the company’s Q2 2013 financial results, it said 93% of their revenues came from little blue links for little blue pills from Canada. Nearly every other thing they do is either losing them money or doesn’t generate any money at all. None of this is new information, however.
What is new is buried at the bottom of their press release:
“On a worldwide basis, we employed 44,777 full-time employees (40,178 in Google and 4,599 in Motorola Mobile) as of June 30, 2013, compared to 53,891 full-time employees (38,739 in Google, 9,982 Motorola Mobile, and 5,170 Motorola Home) as of March 31, 2013.”
In other words, in the span of just three months, 5,383 Motorola Mobility employees were told to clear their desks and leave the office without making a scene. I don’t need to tell you that’s a lot of people. And while I wish I could tell you which divisions of Motorola Mobility these people came from, I can’t. If I had to take a guess, I’d say marketing and upper management.
Curiously, Google also managed to gain 1,439 employees in the span of a quarter. I’d like to think that some or most of them came from Motorola’s mobile division, but that’s an assumption I can’t make because I don’t have any data to back that up.
Update: Steve Kovach from Business Insider did what I should have done, emailed Google. Turns out that yes, over 5,380 people are no longer on Motorola’s payroll, but that doesn’t meant they’re fired. The simply work for Flextronics, who bought some of Motorola’s factories.
