To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by bravo22 » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #99

Somewhat 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-compet…

Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically.

Unfortunately in reality people believe that the only good monopoly is the one they (think) they control. This leads them to pile more and more power into that institution -- Government. This makes the government a prize to win, ripe for abuse and takeover by special interest. In turn the government doesn't do the one thing it is supposed to do, which is ensure competition and prevent monopolies.

The basic premise of anti-trust is that you can't use your power in one area (say search) to gain marketshare in another area (say shopping, or videos). Google should have been broken up a long time ago. This doesn't go against any foundation of capitalism.

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

#102

Post by Nasrudith » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #86

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.

Because conglomerate is a technical term. They aren't making Google washing machines or google munitions. GE is an actual conglomerate.

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

#103

Post by ghaff » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #85

dmitriid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is really the core of it. If you run the numbers, Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company. If a product has a 10-person engineering team and isn't bringing in $40 million / year at a 25% profit margin then there are just better things for those engineers to be working on and the product will likely be shut down so that the team can reprioritize.

I remember back when I was an industry analyst talking to someone at IBM about some initiative other. And one of the things he said--I might not have the number/metric quite right but the idea is the important thing--was that if an initiative isn't going to bring in a billion dollars, it just doesn't move the needle enough to bother with.

Every little project takes some number of cycles from everyone up the management chain as well as finance, HR, etc. etc. At some point, even if it is profitable on its own, it's just too small of a blip to bother with. Plus, of course, no one is going to want to work on it because it's that dead end thing that the company doesn't care about and may randomly cancel at any time.

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

#104

Post by polyomino » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

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…

This could be a good forcing function for them to get their act together on cloud. However, I've heard that teams internally can't build on google cloud for various reasons. It may even make more sense for them to directly spin off onto AWS. Even "seperate" companies like Waymo build their systems on the internal google infra.

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

#105

Post by mthoms » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #100

mthoms wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems intentionally worded to provide plausible deniability. It's one thing to say "don't assume we will always dominate search" and another to say "don't assume we currently dominate search".

The latter "assumption" is an outright falsehood (in the context of the overall search market).

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

#106

Post by Nasrudith » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

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.

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

#107

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

crdrost wrote: post #58

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…

Right, and it’s also a culture thing. If you are operating in the Valley then you get startupy folks who really think in terms of “that’ll crush our competition”... Maybe that is an intrinsic sort of motivation, talking to yourself like that? But it’s not a great culture for the company as a whole because it creates an implicit assumption of a zero-sum game. Like strategically you want to instead be saying something…

they can have that space and we are going to differentiate ourselves by leading in this other space

Be careful with this one. It can be illegal to agree not to compete (INAL).

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

#108

Post by strbean » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

nojito wrote: post #56

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…

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.

I don't see it. All the spinoffs will presumably still use federated Google sign-ins. They can simply contract with the Ads spinoff to share user data.

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

#109

Post by Nasrudith » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #37

Retric wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably spinoffs would end up with their own copy of all software infrastructure, which would evolve independently at that point.

I'm not sure that's presumable. It sounds like a better way to do things in the short run (in the long run, there's a net loss from the loss of the cross-pollination benefits of security and best-practice on the backend that Google enjoys now).

It depends on how stupid the regulators are - the one with the google name will win. Seriously people - domain names and awareness matter ans you can't just partition websites to regions with an international web.

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

#110

Post by ocdtrekkie » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #87

dmitriid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Additional reason: all the infrastructure is changing underneath these projects. Let’s say you have a Google product for feeding people, let’s call it “Google Feeder”. Now, you need big piles of food to feed people, so you build it on top of “Google Pile System” to manage all of those piles. People like Google Feeder, but it’s not successful enough to fund an engineering team. At some point, Google Pile System gets r…

That just suggests that building on top of proprietary internal infrastructure is a massive waste of value. If web app code were books, Google'd be burning the Library of Alexandria just because nobody else could read what the books were written in.

And that reiterates that breaking up Google would be good for Google's value. Not being able to rely on internal shortcuts means more dead products could be sold.