Note that -- in a not untypical for Re/Code demonstration of a near-complete absence of journalistic standards -- the assertion that Google's hiring of (some of) the Homejoy team is about moving into home services is not even attributed to any source or set of sources. The only sourced facts are:
(1) Google is hiring a portion of Homejoy's staff (sourced to Google)
(2) Homejoy's current platform will be shuttered (sourced to completely unspecific "sources", but this is pretty explicit in Homejoy's own public shutdown announcement.)
(3) Google "had set out to enter" the home services space "earlier this year" (sourced to a Buzzfeed article, which actually claimed that Google was in the process of readying an offering in the space, that doesn't indicate the timing of the planned launch, so really doesn't support the past-intention characterization given in the Re/Code article.)
So, Homejoy is shutting down (which we knew), Google has hired some of Homejoy's technical staff, and there were reports a few months back that Google might be readying some product in a space related to (but not identical to) what Homejoy was doing.
Note that Kara Swisher (executive editor of Re/Code) was married to Megan Smith [1]. Megan is now CTO of the United States, but previously was at Google for over a decade and a VP at Google X.
It's not unreasonable that Kara, and by extension her team, would therefore have made a number of high-level contacts inside Google.
That said, if they are speaking to sources then they should reference them (even if anonymously.) Otherwise, as you noted, we can only consider it an opinion piece masquerading as journalism.
All excellent points, but even given the earlier reports, we don't know for sure that Google is moving into a related space. They didn't pay any money for the company. Maybe they simply wanted some good, proven engineers.
Yeah, when I first heard the news I pretty much assumed Homejoy investor Google Ventures simply assisted some of the employees in getting jobs at Google so it wasn't a total loss. Home services doesn't strike me as making much sense for Google unless it was some sort of marketplace, comparison shopping or match-making service.
(1) Google is hiring a portion of Homejoy's staff (sourced to Google)
(2) Homejoy's current platform will be shuttered (sourced to completely unspecific "sources", but this is pretty explicit in Homejoy's own public shutdown announcement.)
(3) Google "had set out to enter" the home services space "earlier this year" (sourced to a Buzzfeed article, which actually claimed that Google was in the process of readying an offering in the space, that doesn't indicate the timing of the planned launch, so really doesn't support the past-intention characterization given in the Re/Code article.)
So, Homejoy is shutting down (which we knew), Google has hired some of Homejoy's technical staff, and there were reports a few months back that Google might be readying some product in a space related to (but not identical to) what Homejoy was doing.