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To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

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Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#61

Post by jacquesm »

flak48 wrote: post #32

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. Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking. Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a…

Yes, because changing the words will change the facts - not. You can try to squirm all you want to try to make a monopoly into something that it isn't but that's a lot harder than it may seem and not everybody will be sensitive to such word games. Some might even say that such word games in and of themselves should constitute evidence that a company is a monopoly, it is knowingly misrepresenting the status quo as something that it isn't.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#62

Post by derryrover »

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.

Did any of you working for big-corp ever experience problems caused by this language use?

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#63

Post by cma »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #48
flak48 wrote: post #32

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. Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking. Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a…

Yep. This is hardly new. I have been at Google since the mid 2000s and this stuff has been around at least since then. There was also a similar training when I was at Microsoft. Btw, in the trainings I've taken, it's not just about avoiding specific words, but avoiding the thoughts behind those words. Our goal shouldn't be to "dominate the competition/market." The goal should be creating compelling experiences and pr…

> Btw, in the trainings I've taken, it's not just about avoiding specific words, but avoiding the thoughts behind those words.

It could be to keep the trainings themselves from looking bad during discovery.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#64

Post by jacquesm »

I'll help out here with a much simpler definition:

A monopoly is a company that you can not avoid doing business with. Microsoft, Google -> monopolies. Apple -> not yet.

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.

The better way to avoid being labelled a monopoly is to try very hard to play nice with other eco-system players.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#65

Post by II2II »

shadowgovt wrote: post #9
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

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".

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…

On the other hand, couldn't the document be used to suggest that the company is complicit in anti-competitive behaviour?

Keep in mind, it is addressing the use of language rather than discussing the company's motivations or objectives. To use one of the less inflammative examples from the the first excerpt, they aren't claiming that the company's objective is to "improve our product/service". They are claiming that there are ways to say "get ahead of competitors" with fewer legal implications.

While a simple "search and replace" cannot be used, it sanctions the use of non-inflammatory language to conceal intent by the company rather than disproving motivation.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#67

Post by shadowgovt »

mthoms wrote: post #53
xondono wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I’ve never known any colloquial use of “network effects”, it’s quite the technical term with well defined meaning.

Agreed. See also "barriers to entry". But the one that irks me the most is — > "We’ve got lots of competitors, so don’t assume we control or dominate any market." So basically... lie ?. In search (their bread and butter), they certainly don't have "lots" of competitors and they absolutely do "dominate" the market. It's one thing to discourage the use of certain phrases. It's quite another to encourage blatant dishone…

An awful lot of Googlers don't work in search.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#68

Post by shadowgovt »

jacquesm wrote: post #59
shadowgovt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's why we originally had an IETF and RFC's were publicly commented on and why standards are supposed to be company agnostic. The whole proprietary-APIs-over-HTTP was a giant step back. Before we did that interop between internet based applications was far more common and supported. Now every company treats 'their users' as their own private little walled garden when before 'your users' were not so much cows to mi…

I'm not convinced, though there are, obviously, advantages to RFCs and IETF.

The primary disadvantage is speed. A private corporation innovating on its full stack can come up with a faster and more secure HTTP alternative for their use case in the time it takes the RFC process to get up in the morning and find its shoes. Google has a streamed cloud gaming service running in its web browser right now; how long would it take the RFC process to kick out the protocols necessary to enable that?

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#69

Post by jackfoxy »

Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (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 is worth noting when Standard Oil was broken up John D. Rockefeller's net worth went up. The sum value of the new oil companies soon exceeded the value of the old monolith.

Also for reasons I cannot explain, investors happily watch the failed conglomerate model re-invented time and time again, even though history shows conglomerates running their divinions into the ground.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#70

Post by reaperducer »

flak48 wrote: post #32

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. Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking. Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a…

Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking.

I think if you're entombed in the SV bubble, it might not be. But to the rest of the world, it's kind of head-shaking.

Maybe it's because of the industries I've worked in, but clarity of communication was valued, encouraged, and even something we had training in. Say what you mean, so misunderstandings don't lead to mistakes.

The public relations people were trained in what not to say, because that was their job. But for everyone else, internal expression wasn't squelched out of fear of external forces.

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