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Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

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Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#61

Post by wccrawford »

greatgib wrote: post #52

I was a direct witness of such a brain washing case a few years ago. Google was about to release a new version of Android or of Nexus phones. (I don't remember the exact details) And there was an insider leak, so the details of the innovation were published on internet a few days before the official announcement. Leaks are now very common and often organized by companies, but a few years ago it was not yet the case.…

I've never even worked at Google, but if my team is working towards something and our announcement is pre-empted, yeah, I'm going to be upset. I would never wish anyone dead over it, but I would definitely be pissed at them.

There's a lot of work that goes into those announcements. It's not just advertising the product that is the goal, it's presenting it their way.

Similarly, when someone is telling a joke and someone else tells the punchline, they get upset about it. According to your logic, they shouldn't. The joke was told, and the audience heard it. But I've yet to meet anyone who wouldn't be upset about someone else telling the punchline to their joke.

They were not brainwashed. You were incredibly insensitive to their feelings.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#62

Post by shadowgovt »

echelon wrote: post #6

There was a point in time when monopolies weren't understood as economic constructs. We're in a new era where the Famgopolies are something entirely new with an even greater reach. They're all-encapsulating bubbles that ensnare people across all the interactions they perform on a daily basis, then tax every single point of ingress or egress. If they keep growing, the classic Demolition Man scene where everything is T…

You really need to define 'famgolopy' every time you use it. It's not in urbandictionary and the only search results on the topic link back to these threads.

It's too much of a neologism to trust that people understand what you mean from context.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#63

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

mavhc wrote: post #41
johan_felisaz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally out of topic, but I highly recommend it ... (Not technically a spoiler) I really liked the parallel betweens the bad guys' language, which was manipulative to the extreme, and the good guys' language, which was of course less extreme but still contained deceiving vocabulary (i.e. Babel 17 is critiqued because the good guys are called "who are invading", yet the bad guys are themselves called "invaders" in Eng…

People who go to live in other countries are called expats, people coming to live in your country are called immigrants

It's a shame about the downvotes, because that's a perfect example of loaded language which imposes a conceptual frame for both speaker and listener.

It's not an abstract point. It has very real consequences because it's supposed to - and does - trigger expected emotions and behaviours.

PR consultants, politicians, lawyers, ad copy writers, and others who use rhetoric professionally use this kind of loading very deliberately.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#64

Post by alphabetting »

gumby wrote: post #38
titzer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months, unless you apply labels or are on a litigation hold (which would make such policy completely illegal). The email policy has no other purpose than to limit legal exposure. There is no legitimate business reason for that policy. In fact, it actively harms institutional memory and is frankly Orwellian, IMHO.

> They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months Eric Schmidt’s retention policy was 72 hours .

Source? Curious what the reasoning would be there. Seems insanely impractical

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#65

Post by benatkin »

It can get pretty nasty. Last year @jaffathecake who works at Google called @getify's "language" Trump-like for trying to raise the alarm about Chrome looking at hiding the path from the URL bar until the URL bar is focused, like Safari does. The original tweet is deleted, so you can't check whether it was "sowing division", but it wasn't IMO.

https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1275030931577896962

Edit: This is very similar to how Google used their blog to criticize Rand Fishkin, as mentioned in the article. Here's the official post from Google, which reads like a personal attack: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-sends-more...

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#66

Post by amelius »

poof131 wrote: post #42

It amazes me that the consumer welfare standard has become so ingrained in legal antitrust. How is a company town, feudalism, or even slavery not the purest endgame of this logic? Own nothing and forever be indebted. “Wow, everything is free for most consumers, I guess we created a great world!” Can we move on to the total welfare standard, please. [1] [1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements.…

That font ...

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#67

Post by yakubin »

tytso wrote: post #25

When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post. Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is…

> Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers.

The lawn mower would like to have a word with you: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2040>

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#68

Post by toast0 »

greatgib wrote: post #52

I was a direct witness of such a brain washing case a few years ago. Google was about to release a new version of Android or of Nexus phones. (I don't remember the exact details) And there was an insider leak, so the details of the innovation were published on internet a few days before the official announcement. Leaks are now very common and often organized by companies, but a few years ago it was not yet the case.…

To some degree, having the work discussed is great. But depending on the way it leaked, it can diminish the focus on the product, and sometimes it can make the official release flop and that's not great.

From what I hear, Google has/had a policy/culture of largely free information flow inside the company while not having information flow outside the company; a leak undermines that culture/policy and leads to more locked down information flow on the inside, and it's reasonable to be upset about that.

> they became hostile to me for the rest of the lunch for even having suggested that their feeling might not be justified.

People don't usually apprechiate it when they're upset and others tell them their feelings aren't justified and they should feel differently. That's simply not a good way to engage people.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#69

Post by greatgib »

wccrawford wrote: post #61
greatgib wrote: post #52

I was a direct witness of such a brain washing case a few years ago. Google was about to release a new version of Android or of Nexus phones. (I don't remember the exact details) And there was an insider leak, so the details of the innovation were published on internet a few days before the official announcement. Leaks are now very common and often organized by companies, but a few years ago it was not yet the case.…

I've never even worked at Google, but if my team is working towards something and our announcement is pre-empted, yeah, I'm going to be upset. I would never wish anyone dead over it, but I would definitely be pissed at them. There's a lot of work that goes into those announcements. It's not just advertising the product that is the goal, it's presenting it their way. Similarly, when someone is telling a joke and someo…

If you are an engineer working on the software, the announcement really has little interest. You just want it to be wide and sure not being done in a way that put a bad light on your product.

This kind of things happened in my case, and I was more happy to see the interest of the potential users than knowing who disclosed it as it would not be me anyway in all cases.

It might not be true in a small company/team/product. But in a big tech corps, the guy that will do the official announcement is usually quite far and unrelated to the engineers that did the feature.

Also, maybe a piece that was missing from my story is that the Googlers were not even in a team working or related to the disclosed thing. For example they were in the chrome team and it was an Android announcement or something like that.

Another point is that, at Google, it looks like that each big product team is firewalled from the other team. For example, people not working on Android core will not know anything about it or it's development and be in separated buildings and co.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#70

Post by smhost »

tytso wrote: post #25

When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post. Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is…

What exactly is the logic here, that because IBM used to do the same thing Google is doing, and because IBM was not a monopoly, that we should be okay with Google behaving this way?
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