Adios Google, We Hardly Knew Ye

Three months after showing off their new digs in the historic Scarbrough Building downtown, Google announced Wednesday that they were closing their Austin office and offering the 20 engineers employed there jobs at other locations.

In a posting on the official Google Blog, Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research, said closing the office and consolidating locations was done "not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core."

In other moves announced yesterday, Google said it was closing offices in Norway and Sweden, laying off approximately 100 recruiters, and either closing or stopping development on a variety of products: Google Notebook, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Catalog Search and video uploads to Google Video.