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Manila Bulletin devider devider Waze is Not Dead (Yet)

Waze is Not Dead (Yet)

Published Feb 16, 2021 08:38 am

Waze as a navigation app has been synonymous with what Google is for search. With local blog websites reporting the closure of Waze “offices” in the Asia Pacific (to include the Philippines), it gave a misconception to some that the development of the app is being stopped. A few days ago, I encountered a ride-hailing app driver blaming the “closure” of Waze’s local office for the navigation errors that he encountered during our trip.

Don’t you worry, Waze is not dead (yet).

What started as a community project known as FreeMap Israel in 2006, Waze (the commercial name) grew to a 100-employee company in just a matter of three (03) years. It was in June 2013 when search giant Google saw the potential use of vast data harvested by Waze and bought the entire company for US$966M (with each of its employees receiving around US$1.2M each at an average). Soon after, driving has never been the same in most parts of the world where the Internet is available. The Waze app has been part of most Pinoy drivers and delivery personnel lives.

In September 2020, Waze CEO Noam Bardin sent an internal note announcing the layoff of around 5% to its total workforce and closure of some business units attributed to the dramatic decrease in-app usage due to the ongoing pandemic.

“With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many cities and countries have enforced travel restrictions to curb the spread of the disease, so it’s no surprise that our users are driving less (or have stopped altogether), leading to a significant drop in kilometers driven (KMDs), Carpools, and Ad revenue.

Ads Sales Team: The Ads team will pare back and focus on the key markets that drive 93% of revenue and carry 95% of the KMDs we sell in. This means we will be closing the on-the-ground Sales offices in APAC (Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia) and smaller LATAM markets (Colombia, Argentina, Chile). We will continue servicing these countries via increased investments in Waze Local Starter, supported by our SMB teams in our main sales hubs,” according to the internal communication sent by Bardin.

From what I know, there are no Waze developers (programmers) based in Google Philippines. Most of Google’s local operations revolve around sales and marketing, plus some community and user support. Based on my experience, the problems being encountered by drivers with the app are most of the time due to misconfiguration and/or hardware-related.

Over time, we are seeing a lot of new features popping out of Google Maps including traffic and navigation (thanks to their acquisition of Waze?). If I will be asked, I believe that at the end of the day, there can only be one navigation app from the search giant and I bet that it will be Google Maps. For now, we can continue using Waze and share crowdsourced driving information with our fellow motorists.

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