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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

#181

Post by skybrian »

xenocyon wrote: post #96
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…

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…

Those both seem like bad lenses. A more positive approach is that it's not just about what you say, it's about what you do. People working at a powerful company shouldn't advocate doing things to crush competitors, not only for legal reasons, but because it's not right. And that's why there are laws.

As the comic says, with great power comes great responsibility.

But focusing on specific words adds concreteness for literal-minded folks who might otherwise talk that way out of habit.

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

#182

Post by sukilot »

bsanr2 wrote: post #154
dodobirdlord wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company Gentle reminder that thisbis partly because Google isn't fairly compensating the people actually producing the value it accrues to itself: the users. They could start by having accessible customer service.

That doesn't affect the balance of the equation much. The same analysis applies even if customer service cost more.

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

#183

Post by linsomniac »

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.

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

#184

Post by ytdytvhxgydvhh »

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…

I’m not sure that it’s insane to kill off profitable products.

Some folks were upset recently that Honda is discontinuing the Fit subcompact hatchback in the US. That’d be easily understandable if it were an unpopular, unprofitable product. But the Fit was well-loved and dealers struggled to keep them on the lots. So why did Honda kill it? The HR-V subcompact SUV based on the Fit has been produced for the US in the same factory in Mexico and is more profitable and more popular. If you’re Honda, maybe it makes sense to make more of the vehicle that makes twice as much profit and divert resources away from the less profitable model.

Still bums me out that I soon won’t be able to buy a new Honda Fit though.

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

#185

Post by nostrademons »

dehrmann wrote: post #89
jackfoxy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Be careful not to confuse monopolies with conglomerates. You're right conglomerates mismanage (usually neglect) some divisions, but that wasn't the case with Standard Oil. Esso wasn't a neglected divison; oil is oil. The new companies being more valuable is interesting. It helped that they were regional monopolies. Maybe people thought the added competition drove growth on its own. Maybe the new companies became crow…

There's an interesting quirk of markets that can explain the broken-up companies being worth more. Prices in a market are set on the margins: the price of Bitcoin or Tesla stock is set by those who are actively buying and selling. If you think those assets are complete scams, you aren't going to go near them, which means your opinion doesn't matter for the purpose of setting the price.

When a company is broken up into competitive entities, there's uncertainty about which company is going to become dominant in the future. So if you think Esso is going to win the lion's share, you're going to put your money in Esso stock. Ditto Kyso, Calso (Chevron), Sohio, Amoco, Marathon, Mobil, etc. They all get their own teams of cheerleaders, who value the spinoffs at close to the value of the original because they think their preferred spinoff will take most of the market of the parent company. People who disagree with that valuation don't matter, because they aren't going to be trading in that stock anyway.

A similar phenomena likely occurred in the crypto bubble of 2017, where everybody had their pet crypto they were cheerleading and they all expected it to take over the whole economy - this was made even more complicated because many of them were priced in Bitcoin, which had to be purchased to buy any of them, which meant that price increases in Bitcoin were reflected in the price of altcoins as well. It's likely also a factor in Tesla speculation - Tesla shareholders believe it will take over the entire world car market, while Tesla skeptics drop out of the market and don't matter to the price action.

(The risk asymmetry in shorting also contributes to this. In a perfectly efficient market, if you believe something is overvalued you short it instead of dropping out of the market, which drives the price down to fair value. In reality, your downside with shorts is potentially unlimited, you can get rekt if the price stays irrational longer than you stay solvent, and few firms have the resources to maintain short positions in a long-term bubble.)

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

#186

Post by sukilot »

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…

What's the point of saying "Peter Thiel says" when stating basic facts?

May as well say "Wikipedia says"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

"Establishing dominance" section.

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

#187

Post by johannes1234321 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #68
jacquesm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

There is another downside to IETF/RFC/public standard: it's hard to move forward.

My favorite example: e-mail. SMTP and IMAP are old and have so many issues. On the SMTP side it is hard to identify authorized senders, which is a reason for spam, IMAP doesn't really work nice with mobile devices. On the other hand there are messengers like WhatsApp which solves many of those issues and allows adding features (for good or bad) and contrary to mail is fully encrypted and signed (assuming Facebook didn't break it, yet, after adding Signal's technology)

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

#189

Post by shadowgovt »

cat199 wrote: post #174
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…

> Who pays for search who says that 'search' has to be a consolidated system that needs to be paid for?

It's a hell of a lot more convenient as one. Not really thrilled about going back to the days of a fragmented web where webcrawler would give you some results, lycos some others, altavista yet a third batch...

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

#190

Post by johannes1234321 »

jefftk wrote: post #140
shadowgovt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is most of Google's ad revenue from ads on search? They have a huge display ads business also.

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2020Q2_alphabet_earnings... breaks advertising into: "Google Search & other", "YouTube ads", and "Google Network Members' properties". My understanding is the latter is the display ads business, and you can see that it is pretty small, relatively. (Disclosure: I work in Google's display ads business)

I guess the first category is maps and Gmail and other such offerings. (Still plausible to me that search is the primary driver there)
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