Google buys Wix and Meta launches Community Notes: This week’s news roundup

March 21, 2025

5 min read

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Eira Hayward

Eira is an editor for Mind the Product. She's been a business journalist, editor, and copywriter for longer than she cares to think about.

Google to buy cloud cyber-security startup Wiz

Google is to acquire cloud cyber-security startup Wiz for an eye-watering $32 billion after wooing the company’s founders for a protracted period of time. Google tried to buy Wiz last summer for $23 billion but was turned down with the startup declaring it would prefer to pursue an IPO.

Now - though the deal is subject to regulatory review - Google’s persistence looks to have paid off. In a blog post Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport said: “Wiz has achieved so much in a relatively short period, but cybersecurity moves at warp speed and so must we. The time is now. We expect this change to enable us to execute and innovate even faster. Becoming part of Google Cloud is effectively strapping a rocket to our backs: it will accelerate our rate of innovation faster than what we could achieve as a standalone company.”

According to TechCrunch, Google will position Wiz as a multicloud solution, ensuring that its security services are compatible across different platforms, and not limited to Google Cloud. Wiz also brings a large list of customers who chose Wiz because of its ability to support multiple cloud platforms and who may not use Google Cloud at all. And, as TechCrunch also points out, Google needs to embrace the multicloud model simply in order to stand any chance of competing with MS Azure and AWS, which both have a much bigger share of the global cloud market.

CEOs believe they will lose their jobs if they don’t deliver AI business gains

A Harris survey and report on behalf of AI platform Dataiku throws up some interesting stats and food for thought for product managers and others working with artificial intelligence. The report, Global AI Confessions Report: CEO Edition, surveyed over 500 CEOs worldwide and finds that:

74% of CEOs think they’ll lose their jobs within two years if they don’t deliver AI business gains
94% of CEOs think that an AI agent could provide equal or better counsel on business decisions than a human board member

70% of CEOs believe that a failed AI strategy or AI-induced crisis will result in a CEO being ousted by the end of the year
80% of CEOs are concerned that AI deployments could inadvertently harm employees or customers
35% of AI initiatives are ‘AI washing’, done for optics rather than any business benefit
The UK is pushing ahead of the rest of Europe in artificial intelligence adoption, with chief execs in the EU more likely to delay initiatives because of unclear regulation.

Said Florian Douetteau, CEO of Dataiku: “For CEOs today, every AI decision feels like a high-stakes gamble that can drive competitive dominance or lead to costly consequences. The only way to turn AI into an enduring advantage is to assert greater control and governance — future-proofing not just the companies these CEOs run, but their own roles as leaders in an increasingly AI-powered economy.”

Meta launches Community Notes to replace independent fact checkers

Some weeks after announcing it would replace independent fact checkers with X (formerly Twitter)-style crowdsourced fact checks, Meta has launched Community Notes for Facebook, Instagram and Threads users in the US. The company says it will concentrate on getting Community Notes right in the US before it is rolled out elsewhere in the world.

Historically Meta has referred content that might be false or misleading to independent organisations to assess their reliability. This historic independent fact checking process has been criticised for things, including a lack of transparency, lack of recourse and inconsistent enforcement. A blog post from Meta at the start of the year stated: ”Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.”

Equally the Community Notes initiative that will replace independent fact checking is being criticised for the same reasons that the X initiative has been decried, including: the risk that fact checking can be gamified and misinformation amplified, lack of necessary expertise to check complex claims, limited global and cultural perspectives and a lack of transparency and accountability.