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.
To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
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Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#22There 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.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#23Isn't this just a form of theater? Word swapping doesn't change anything about the actual reality.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#24Reminds 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. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
Surprisingly, it's not. It's evidence that Google knows some words are open to misinterpretation, so engineers are encouraged to use more accurate words and not stray into words with colloquial meanings differing from their legal meanings (because subpoenas lack context). If I say I'm "killing it" this week, I'm not committing homicide.
Well, I’ve never known any colloquial use of “network effects”, it’s quite the technical term with well defined meaning.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#25At Amazon, all employees are trained not to use the words: "marketplace", "platform", and a few others.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#26Isn’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.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#27This 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).
Language matters in law, yes, but language also impacts company culture.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not exactly. The key idea of the training is that rank-and-file SWEs don't realize that words have legal meanings separate from their colloquial meanings, and they can cause undue trouble for the company and for themselves with poor word-choice. It's more about "Don't say the product is 'dominating the market' when you don't have any idea what your product's percent share is in the market or, for that matter, how 'ma…
Right. People are reading into this way too much, in reality it looks like pretty standard "don't use legalese when you're not a lawyer" type training that I've seen at every BigCo.
The Hal Varian quote there is a good illustration of this. If it was an attorney representing Google talking over e-mail, such an aside would be protected by attorney-client privilege and would not have been subject to discovery. It is a banal and funny comment that would have been fine to make in-person. It should not have been made in writing.
This is why stuff like Slack is like opening a Lebanese fertilizer storage warehouse right next to your fireworks factory. It is just stupid to make even more of your company communications subject to discovery. Email and note-taking software is bad and dangerous enough.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#29Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. 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, et…
It's not even so much about protecting the secret sauce as protecting user data. Every tool interfacing to the Google backend is a potential attack vector. When the time comes that nobody's willing to bear the cost to keep it updated as the core infrastructure changes, the product dies. In a world where Google is split up, that'll still be true; it'll look more like "Google CoreCloud has just changed API foo to prote…
Presumably spinoffs would end up with their own copy of all software infrastructure, which would evolve independently at that point.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#30I 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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
I'm wondering where the line is between healthy competitive drive and anticompetitive behavior/thinking.