News after news from Google. Given the current context, as some states are reconsidering closure amid the increased number of infections, Google looks out for its employees.
Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced that the company's employees that are not required to be in the office could work remotely until June 30, 2021. This move makes Google the first major company to extend the remote-work arrangement into next summer, revising the already announced terminus date of January 2021.
According to the statement, the extension will impact almost all 200,000 employees in California, the UK, Brazil, India, and such. The company has reopened 42 offices worldwide, especially where the pandemic wasn't so harsh – Greece, Thailand, and Australia.
However, Google is not planning to go fully remote, like Twitter, which announced that its employees could work from home "forever" if they want to. Also, Facebook allows its employees to request an everlasting remote-work arrangement. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, his company will continue to work from home for the next five to 10 years.
From Sundar Pichai's point of view, working from home has the potential to become the new normal. This can be beneficial to people looking for jobs in Silicon Valley but were geographically restricted.
The other news coming from Google is that it is considering setting up a new undersea fiber-optic cable made to connect the US, the UK, and Spain. The cable will have the name of the American computer programming pioneer – Grace Hopper and will bring “better resilience for the network that underpins Google’s consumer and enterprise products.” The cable will run 6,250 km from the States to the UK, and 6,300 km from the US to Spain.
The project is to end in 2022.
While Google is trying to improve something that’s already there, Facebook announced in May that it would build an undersea cable around Africa to facilitate internet access in the continent. According to the company, the cable will be "nearly equal to the circumference of the Earth." The social media giant partnered with China Mobile, Orange, Vodafone, MNT, and various African operators.
Yesterday, Google’s stock price was higher by 1.20%.
Sources: cnbc.com, cnn.com