Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup.<p>Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, etc. (for example: Google Reader could not be spun off because it assumed things about Google's infrastructure + libraries.) So Google arrives at this strange position where medium-yet-small profitable products can't be spun off or divested because of Google's secret sauce (their internal infrastructure). So Google kills successful products instead, because it isn't interested in scaling up an only _modestly_ successful product.<p>This is insane and a sign that something is deeply wrong in Google. Splitting Google up, forcing this infrastructure to become open, etc would be much healthier than perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce.
I don't work at Google but I had to take similar training too, where using words/phrases like 'dominant', 'market share', 'leading in a market' etc were discouraged. Specifically because the 'market' can be interpreted in a zillion different ways, especially for tech companies.<p>Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking.<p>Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a monopoly and not a monopoly by simply increasing the definition and size of the market that the company is operating in. (And how companies will generally try to avoid being classified as monopolies this way)<p>e.g. Google is a monopoly if you consider online advertising as the market, but if you stretch the market to all advertising (including print, radio, TV and billboards), Google might not be considered one.<p>Similarly Amazon in the e-commerce market vs general retail.
This isn't really uncommon. Part of my training at my current job for a large company which is decidedly not a monopoly includes these kind of suggestions, definitely directed towards avoiding anti-competitive legal issues. Honestly I think you could almost argue that it's helpful to change the language, because it keeps focus off of "crushing the competition" and on "serving the users best" (IIRC that's an exact example from my training).<p>Language matters in law, yes, but language also impacts company culture.
If you think this rule is silly because the lawyers ought to know that when an engineer says something that uses a term used colloquially that the lawyers will interpret legally, you aren't allowed to be pedantic when a non-programmer uses a programming term incorrectly either.<p>Like, you can't complain when someone says "growing exponentially" when they mean "growing really fast."<p>It's the same sort of problem, and it is unfortunate that the lawyers can do it. But It happens in every field, really.
Isn’t this standard practice in big corps? These trainings are usually contracted to third parties and they tend to have similar content with small customizations for each company.
One of the leaked documents this article is based on explains a lot more of the background: <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7016657-Five-Rules-of-Thumb-for-Written-Communications.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7016657-Five-Rules-o...</a><p>(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
I immediately thought of mafia code words they would use to defeat wiretaps. Like:<p><i>Among the lines used were: "The sheep need shearing ... the shears need sharpening" or "The hay is ready." The Italian police said they do not believe the mafia members were discussing agricultural matters.</i><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/the-head-of-the-sicilian-mafia-used-sheep-code-to-communicate-2015-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/the-head-of-the-sicilian-maf...</a>
I feel like in this case, regulators should be able to re-substitute any of the "good" terms, with the "bad" terms when citing email evidence, since clearly, Google has now shown that phrases like "valuable to users" are synonyms in their parlance for "network effects".
Reminds me of Peter Thiel's observation that monopolies lie.[1] Also, IANAL but I can't imagine a memo/training that says not to use certain words because of "regulatory issues" is not itself evidence that Google knows of its own monopolistic status.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...</a>
That isn't surprising - lawyers love to pull propaganda Kafkatraps based on twistings of words and only taking what they want to hear/say as opposed to the whole message. And former lawyers make up those grandstanders.
Anyone who has ever worked in trading in the past decade should be familiar with these sort of rules. Anything that you say that can remotely be interpreted as manipulating the market will get you written up or possibly fired. It could be something as innocuous as "Tesla's valuation is insane right now."
Every publicly traded company I've ever worked for made similar requests of words we shouldn't use, including "dominant" when talking about one of our products that had a large market share. I don't think this caution is unique to Google.
I have worked in blockchain / cryptocurrency for years. Remember team - it's a "utility token", not a "security"! Words matter!
I wonder where the line is. Is it ok for a startup like slack to attempt to 'kill email'? Is it ok for a startup like Slack to try to 'destroy' email? What about destroying Outlook specifically?<p>I'm also wondering to what degree this would apply if Google didn't have so many products; would it be ok for Gmail employees to destroy Outlook if Gmail was its own company, separate from all the rest?<p>As a personally competitive person, I tend to be motivated by a drive to destroy the competition and deprive them of business (through fantastic products and great customer service), whether that competition is internal or external to the business. The existence of upstart competitors is explicitly licensed by the failure of established competitors to failing to serve their customers well.<p>If you work at a place like Microsoft Office in 2010, do you just continue to excuse the existence of things like Google Docs? Would it be wrong to destroy their business prospects by getting in on the online collaborative editing game? Would it have been wrong to do so in 2003, when internal engineers prototyped it, before Google Docs was released?<p>Many companies that were dominant have seen their near-monopoly positions eroded by new entrants; I can't help but think they were hurt by lack of a drive to destroy the competition and keep it that way. One example seems to be Adobe Illustrator and Sketch. It would have been better for consumers if Adobe just came out with its newer tools like XD, rather than waiting for Sketch to force their hand.<p>I'm wondering where the line is between healthy competitive drive and anticompetitive behavior/thinking.
The real gist is you should assume all internal communication will one day be cited (even out of context) in front of a Congressional committee, so even what you think is harmless speculation, a joke, a casual opinion, or even sarcasm, could have you testifying under oath.
> "Bad: the defensive rationale for this acquisition is clear: Get ahead of the competition and cut off their access to the target's product"<p>> "Good: The rationale for this acquisition is clear: Integrate the target with Google and improve our products for users"<p>The conversion is very lossy so will likely hamstring Google's business processes, both immediately and by eventual morphing of the vague-wording culture into the bullshit culture.<p>Which it seems would serve the purpose of promoting competition - selectively handicapping companies big enough to worry about antitrust makes room for smaller and nimbler companies.
I know this is not much, but when I joined de-Googlefication initiative, I felt it's a right thing to do. Firefox with uBlock Origin, DuckDuckGo, Lineage OS on the smartphone. When I have to use Google products, say Maps or YouTube,I do it from separate "compartment".
It's not that much. But when I stopped feeling like I'm a victim of strangely sophisticated, odd and dystopian evil, openly claiming "we are the internet", killing companies and products, I felt like I'm a part of a small, statistically insignificant, but determined and well-informed resistance.
>We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share,
>Instead of “market,” employees may say “industry,” “space,” “area,” or simply cite the region, according to the presentation.<p>Sometimes I feel like people take language far too literally and forget that the point of.language is communication and intent, changing the language really doesn't change the meaning behind anything, but because we live in a world where every word is being taken increasingly literally without any search for intent or meaning, we end up with utter nonsense like this.
"Dominance rule" is a common term in the science of combinatorial optimization. It felt a awkward when I first heard it, but the word fits pretty well to its meaning. I don't think it is a good idea to change such common terms because of such trends or even "Excel" (due to Excel's autocorrect, certain gene names are taboo and get renamed <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385</a>)
There is always going to be some gray line that, if crossed, gets you into antitrust territory, and Alphabet is incentivized to get as close to that line as possible without going over it. And it's large enough to invest considerable resources into figuring out just how close to the line it can get.<p>That's why language like this matters so much to Alphabet. When you're operating close to the line, even if you haven't gone over it, you don't want to give anybody any reason to suggest you're an inch further than you actually are.
Employees "are further cautioned never to print or hand out their slides".<p>This inspires a brand new thought; I should find ways to surreptitiously record Google sales meetings.
There was a similar rule when I was at Microsoft: I'm paraphrasing, but we couldn't talk about beating the competition, we had to just frame things in a specific way.
Reminded me of Hal Varian talking about Google's dominance and (dismissing any role of) network effects back in 2008:<p><a href="https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.html" rel="nofollow">https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.htm...</a><p>They were pretty on message even a decade ago.
> “We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share,” that document says.<p>Then wouldn't a court, whenever it sees "User Preference for Google Search" or any other similar euphemism, simply treat it as meaning "market share"?
Stick a fork in it, it's done. Once a corporation starts lying to itself and employees are expected to participate, it's doomed. I agree that a breakup would be the best thing for the individual units at this point.
Franklin Roosevelt did not allow anyone to make recordings or take minutes in White House meetings. Historians find this very frustrating, but all you need for a rationale for that is what happened to Nixon.
I'll help out here with a much simpler definition:<p>A monopoly is a company that you can not avoid doing business with. Microsoft, Google -> monopolies. Apple -> not yet.<p>That way we can save us all some time debating how many angels can dance on a pin. Note that both Google and Microsoft have worked very hard to make it that way, it is only fair that they should accept the flip side of that coin. If you break email to the point where your only options are to either see a good portion of your mail undelivered or join the borg then you've just turned yourself into a monopoly.<p>The better way to avoid being labelled a monopoly is to try very hard to play nice with other eco-system players.
"Certainly don't change your behavior! By all means, continue to lie, cheat, and steal. Just make sure you come up with code words for it."
When I started working in Real Estate, it blew me away that our company reviewed listing comments looking for, among other things, "man cave", because it could demonstrate a bias towards selling it to a man. Bias is a very real problem, I just hadn't thought about "has a man cave" in that light before.
All the big tech companies do this, and yes, it is not OK. These organizations are too big, wield too much power, and are like governments unto themselves. For some reason, they have not had the same public perception and have avoided labels like "conglomerate" that have stuck to other companies like Samsung.
Somewhat tangential, but here's something I see to be a fundamental challenge with capitalism:<p>Two properties that significantly increase the value that an individual business can provide to users are economies of scale and network effects. The former lets them provide more user value for less cost. The latter gives users N^2 increasing value at only N cost.<p>But those two properties are also fundamentally anti-competitive. The fewer independent competing businesses there are, the greater these properties are maximized.<p>This doesn't mean capitalism should be completely discarded, but it means there is an unhealthy positive feedback loop where the system will trend towards consolidation and monopolies unless some other equally powerful force balances it out.<p>At the same time, going too far in the opposite direction and having many competing small companies may also be worse for consumers. You get more optimal pricing of more inefficiently produced goods because of the lower economies of scale and network effects.
So being a monopolist comes with quite the potential costs.
Employees now have to memorize meaningless, if not just plain wrong, synonyms. Not to talk about the miscommunication this might cause.<p>Did any of you working for big-corp ever experience problems caused by this language use?
Wow. Read this the other way around, and they all but admit that the purpose of integrating acquisitions into Google is to cut off access to competitors.
I find that if you can't speak frankly and avoid trouble, then you need to give a long hard thought to what you're doing. A terd is still a terd by any other name.
Is this from The Onion? How are they going to communicate efficiently? Are they going to pass each mail through a safespeak-to-efficientspeak translator? Some automatic transformer mail plugin digging out the real meaning of sentences?
> “Alphabet gets sued a lot, and we have our fair share of regulatory investigations,” reads another. “Assume every document will become public.”<p>:)
> We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share,” that document says<p>Now that this document is out, can't the government just map their fancy words back to the original word using this doc as a map?
To throw off the feds, the mob starts using code words... like the feds don’t know.<p>People will talk about the subject but use different words is all.<p>Isn’t this as transparent as mafiosi saying things like “when you get the big fish in the lights send the fish to the butcher?“ Who would they be fooling?
We reached the big tech version of Orwell's Politics and the English Language... <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/" rel="nofollow">https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...</a>