201–210 of 319 posts
To throw off the feds, the mob starts using code words... like the feds don’t know. People will talk about the subject but use different words is all. Isn’t this as transparent as mafiosi saying things like “when you get the big fish in the lights send the fish to the butcher?“ Who would they be fooling?
It doesn't matter what the "feds" think, only the court's opinion is relevant to the outcome.
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…
Googler also. I believe that the phrase used to capture the desired mindset is "respect the opportunity".
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 tr…
A small company will usually not have that really. A large one has regulators looking at them and someone looking to sue to get a slice of the pie. Your emails and texts are subject to ending up in a legal case. They can use your stuff out of context and say you were doing something else. Remember they will lie about you. As they do not care about truth they want to win for their client (be it the gov or someone else). Can they get in trouble for that? Sure. But sometimes they just see if they can get away with it. Usually they just get told no, usually.
I have never worked a day in SV. This sort of training is common in big companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who pays for search If search is of value to you, the user, wouldn't you, the user, be willing to pay for it?
I'm willing to pay $5/mo Much of India will pay $1/mo Most people will pay $.1/month What will the price be?
If you allow Google/Alphabet to practice price discrimination, it will charge customers in richer countries more. You and I would pay $5/month, much of India would pay $1/month, and people who can only afford $.1/month would pay that.
If you insist that the price be uniform over all users, then it has to be $.1/month, or whatever the lowest common denominator is. Of course in that scenario it's much harder to get to a revenue number that is anywhere close to Alphabet's current revenue.
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…
The engineering effort required to split up a mammoth code base where everything has been written based on those assumptions about the rest of the codebase is making such a split extremely unlikely to succeed. We're not talking about a few millions lines of code, we're talking about billions[1] of lines of code. It would take more than a decade of having thousands of engineers work only on this and not do anything el…
> "Good: The rationale for this acquisition is clear: Integrate the target with Google and improve our products for users"
The conversion is very lossy so will likely hamstring Google's business processes, both immediately and by eventual morphing of the vague-wording culture into the bullshit culture.
Which it seems would serve the purpose of promoting competition - selectively handicapping companies big enough to worry about antitrust makes room for smaller and nimbler companies.
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 s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What is true though is that once a protocol is 'good enough and it gains mass adoption that change is hard but this is more to be blamed on human nature and inertia than that it is to be blamed on the RFC system in itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Could you elaborate on this? How would it be illegal to target a different market?
Cartels are usually thought of as groups in the same market colluding, but it's not limited to that. Two companies colluding not to compete in their respective markets is still a cartel.