Google is breaking apart its Maps and Commerce division, with the section head being moved to another team. The stepping down of Jeff Huber from his position along with splitting up the department appears to be a continuation of Google's shuffle of management and divisions
from yesterday, which saw Andy Rubin step down and be replaced by Sundar Pichai.
According sources of
the Wall Street Journal, Huber will be joining the
Google X division, a section headed by Sergey Brin that works on special projects, such as
self-driving cars and
Google Glass. A company spokeswoman praised Huber's work in the last decade, including some of Google's "most complicated issues like ads, apps, payments, and geo."
The departmental split sees Maps becoming part of the Search division, headed by Alan Eustace, and parts of the department covering Commerce will move in with the advertising teams, managed by Susan Wojcicki. This will bring the new number of department heads down from seven to just five: Wojcicki, Eustace, Pichai, Vic Gundotra of Google+, and Salar Kamangar of YouTube.
While the announcement for Rubin's reassignment and Pichai's new management position covering Android, Chrome, and Apps was announced via the official blog through a
post by Larry Page, the Huber and department changes were only announced internally. While this could be seen as a way for Google to keep the maneuver as secret as possible from the general public, it is more likely the fact that the Rubin change would potentially affect Android developers, and such was needed to be announced.
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