Oh jeez you’re not supposed to write this shit down. Learn from the Wall Street guys and send emails that say “call me”
To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
91–100 of 319 posts
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#92Google (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…
> perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. I doubt Google kills those products because it can't spin them off because of secret sauce. Google kills those products because: - they are not profitable enough (profitable enough for Google ) - they don't drive engagement and ad sales enough (once again, not enough for Google ) - it offers no promotion paths for people who may run them, so it's…
> I doubt Google kills those products because it can't spin them off because of secret sauce.
If Google were actually killing off products for this reason alone, you'd think they'd start building products on GCP so spinning them off would be easy.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#93If 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. Like, you can't complain when someone says "growing exponentially" when they mean "growing really fast." It's the same sort of problem, and i…
Good point. But because being arrogant is more fun ...
... first a nitpick:
Exponential growth is a mathematics term and it's misused a lot by programmers and HN users (to mean "growing really fast.").
... then a wider sweeping comment:
Thanks to COVID-19, the understanding of what exponential growth means has probably increased a lot in the general population. It was quite funny to see people saying things like "Not only are the cases growing exponentially, but the daily increase is also growing exponentially."
Well, you can show them wolframalpha.com/input/?i=derivative+of+e%5Ex or there 10th class math books with all the content they knew they would never need once they left school.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#94Google (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…
> 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. There are probably many Googlers here who have sacrificed huge portions of their life and time getting the Google infrastructure to work. Forcing engineers to make changes to their creation is insane. Personally, I’d rather not build anything than hav…
Engineers are forced by management to make changes to their creations anyway. What’s the difference between management telling an engineer to do something and the government telling management to tell an engineer to do something?
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google will likely go under if they are broken up. The prevailing theory is that their ad success is solely due to data sharing throughout their service offerings.
The search engine alone is a money printing machine even without sophisticated ads. As an example, if I search for 'nike' right now, the first result is an ad payed by Nike leading to nike.com, the second is an ad for an independent webshop selling Nike products and the third is the first actual search result (almost not on the screen anymore), again leading to nike.com So, effectively Nike is paying Google (a lot) t…
> So, effectively Nike is paying Google (a lot) to get the result they would have if there were no ads
Yes, but we live in a world with ads, so what they're actually paying for is making sure a competitor doesn't show up. That's why I consider branded keywords a racket.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#96I 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…
I think whether one finds this kind of newspeak shocking depends on how you view this:
Lens #1: This jumping through terminology hoops is a burden one has to undergo because of living in a litigious society. Having to resort to newspeak is not your fault, it's the government's, for creating all these rules and regulations.
Lens #2: If monopolies are bad for capitalism, then companies should not just in word but also in deed refrain from pursuing monopolization. Resorting to newspeak is hypocrisy: an attempt to continue monopolistic actions in practice while disclaiming them in speech.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#97Google (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…
> 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. There are probably many Googlers here who have sacrificed huge portions of their life and time getting the Google infrastructure to work. Forcing engineers to make changes to their creation is insane. Personally, I’d rather not build anything than hav…
" Forcing engineers to make changes to their creation is insane."
Really? Is it really insane to command employees to do what the company wants?
One of the biggest issues google has always had is allowing engineers to do what they want to get them to work on various platforms. Do you know how many thousands of hidden commands are in gmail?
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#98I'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 t…
I think this is a useful definition and you make a good point.
However if your business is app development, can you really avoid doing business with Apple?
I don't own any Apple products so I've worked around it by building progressive web apps, but I've had many people tell me they want my app in the app store and won't use it otherwise. I'm a small player so I'm doing ok, but I can't imagine building an actual business and not being forced to do business with Apple.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#99Somewhat tangential, but here's something I see to be a fundamental challenge with capitalism:
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.
But those two properties are also fundamentally anti-competitive. The fewer independent competing businesses there are, the greater these properties are maximized.
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.
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.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#100Earlier 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…
That isn't a lie it is more a memento mori sort of thing and well founded paranoia. Take MySpace as an example. If they really messed up do you think bing or duckduckgo wouldn't eat their lunch? The graveyards are filled with indispensable men.