CyberSonday: Google

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lunes, 14 de septiembre de 2020

Google buys more land in Kirkland as its Seattle-area workforce nears 6,000 employees

Google owns more than 400,000 square feet of office space at the new Kirkland Urban mixed use development in the Seattle region. (Ryan Properties Photos)

Google continues to grow its Seattle-area footprint despite the ongoing pandemic.

The tech giant just finalized its purchase of the Kirkland Urban East plot, a Google spokesperson confirmed. The company last year bought about 400,000 square feet of office space across the North and Central buildings at Kirkland Urban, a new development in Kirkland, Wash, just east of Seattle.

The purchase price was $40 million, King County property records show. Business Insider first reported the news.

“Google finalized the purchase of the Kirkland Urban East plot, which will complete the Kirkland Urban site and serve as additional space for long-term growth in the area,” a Google spokesperson said.

The expansion comes despite a pandemic that has forced some companies to pull back on physical office space with a shift to remote work. Outdoor retailer REI said earlier this month that it will look to sell its brand new HQ in nearby Bellevue, Wash. due to the pandemic.

Google is allowing employees to work remotely until July 2021.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in April that the company would slow hiring due to the economic crisis. It is also slashing marketing budgets in the latter half of 2020.

Google parent Alphabet beat estimates for its second quarter earnings with $38.3 billion in revenue, though it had the company’s first quarterly year-over-year revenue decline ever.

Shares of Alphabet are up nearly 50% since March.

Google’s building in South Lake Union. (GeekWire File Photo / James Thorne)

Google already has a huge separate campus in Kirkland, the Seattle suburb where it first set up shop 16 years ago.

Since then, Google has grown to around 2 million square feet of office space spread across several cities in the area, including a Google Cloud campus in Amazon’s backyard of South Lake Union in Seattle that opened last year.

The company leased two additional buildings in Kirkland earlier this year. Its Seattle-area real estate portfolio gives the tech giant room for more than 10,000 people.

Google has more than 5,750 employees total in the region working on everything from Android technology to cloud computing. There are nearly 700 open jobs based in the Seattle area.

There are now more than 130 companies from around the globe that have set up engineering outposts in and around Seattle. But recent layoffs at companies including Airbnb and Uber makes the future of at least some of these outposts as an engine for tech job growth more uncertain.

In a recent report covering the Seattle office market, Broderick Group found that remote work is “certainly a long-term trend” but noted that “it will not be the death of office space.”

In a separate report, commercial real estate company JLL said a steady influx of sublease listings are now coming on the market in Seattle.

Kirkland Urban is also home to an office for Seattle-based Tableau Software, which signed a lease for 92,000 square feet on three floors of Urban North. Virtual golf center Topgolf and popular burger chain Shake Shack are also tenants.

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viernes, 7 de agosto de 2020

Watch: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google CEOs testify before Congress in historic antitrust hearing

The top executives at four of the world’s largest and most powerful technology companies are testifying Wednesday before Congress in the culmination of a year-long antitrust inquiry.

The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust arm will grill Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai on the power their companies wield in the tech sector.

“Our founders would not bow before a king nor should we bow before the emperors of a digital economy,” said Rep. David Cicilline, chair of the antitrust subcommittee, in opening remarks.

The executives are testifying remotely due to the ongoing coronavirus threat, creating a different dynamic than the blockbuster hearings of the past, like Zuckerberg’s testimony on election interference in 2018. Cicilline reminded the CEOs that they are not allowed to take input from their teams during testimony, but it isn’t clear how or if the committee is enforcing that rule.

Early questioning focused on Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, Apple’s treatment of third-party app developers, and Google’s dominance in search. More than an hour into the hearing, lawmakers still hadn’t posed any questions to Bezos, even though it is the Amazon chief’s first time testifying before Congress.

After nearly two hours, the first question for Bezos came from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington who represents Amazon’s hometown, Seattle.

“The issue that we’re concerned with here his very simple,” she said. “You have access to data that far exceeds the sellers on your platform with whom you compete … you have access to the entirety of sellers’ pricing and inventory — information past, present, and future — and you dictate the participation of third-party sellers on your platform, so you can set the rules of the game for your competitors but not follow those rules yourself. Do you think that’s fair to the mom and pop businesses who can sell on your platform?”

Underlying Jayapal’s line of questioning is a Wall Street Journal investigation from April that found Amazon uses detailed data on third-party sellers in its marketplace to inform the development of in-house products.

Bezos said Amazon has a policy prohibiting such use of seller data but, “I can’t guarantee you that that policy has never been violated.”

Jayapal was following up on testimony that Amazon attorney Nate Sutton gave one year ago before the same committee claiming the company does not use individual seller data to inform its private-label product strategy.

Jayapal also grilled Zuckerberg on its acquisition strategy, accusing Facebook of threatening to copy Instagram and Snapchat while in discussions about buying them.

“You’ve used Facebook’s power to threaten smaller competitors and ensure that you always get your way,” she said. “These tactics increase your dominance … Facebook’s model makes it impossible for new companies to flourish successfully.”

Zuckerberg said he did not remember threatening competitors and defended the practice of developing features that consumers were demanding at the time.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon raised a controversial price war between Amazon and Diapers.com that ultimately ended in Amazon acquiring the competitor’s parent company and then shutting it down. Scanlon claimed Amazon lowered prices on diapers to drive the competitor out of business and then raised them when the competitive threat was eliminated.

“I don’t remember that at all,” Bezos said. “What I remember is that we matched competitor prices.”

The long-awaited hearing comes as the companies in question field investigations into alleged anti-competitive behavior from regulators in the United States and abroad.

The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have divvied up the four companies as they investigate whether antitrust law has been violated. The House began its own inquiry a year ago and several states are also looking into the dominance of the nation’s largest tech companies.

We’ll be following along and updating this story throughout the day. Check back for highlights and analysis from the historic hearing and read prepared remarks from Bezos, Cook, Zuckerberg, and Pichai.

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sábado, 1 de agosto de 2020