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To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

437 points by caution 6y ago

seibelj 6y ago
I have worked in blockchain / cryptocurrency for years. Remember team - it's a "utility token", not a "security"! Words matter!
baryphonic 6y ago
Reminds me of Peter Thiel's observation that monopolies lie.[1] Also, IANAL but I can't imagine a memo/training that says not to use certain words because of "regulatory issues" is not itself evidence that Google knows of its own monopolistic status. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Surprisingly, it's not. It's evidence that Google knows some words are open to misinterpretation, so engineers are encouraged to use more accurate words and not stray into words with colloquial meanings differing from their legal meanings (because subpoenas lack context). If I say I'm "killing it" this week, I'm not committing homicide.
  - xondono 6y ago
    Well, I’ve never known any colloquial use of “network effects”, it’s quite the technical term with well defined meaning.
    - mthoms 6y ago
      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 dishonesty.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        An awful lot of Googlers don't work in search.
        mthoms 6y ago
        Right, and they seem to be encouraged to be dishonest about Google's position in search. Anyways, a majority of Google's non-search products are intrinsically tied to their search product so it's still relevant.
      - Nasrudith 6y ago
        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.
        mthoms 6y ago
        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).
        Nasrudith 6y ago
        Bizzarely heurestic delusions and self-deception can be useful for taking to heart something which isn't literally true. Take "the gun is always loaded" rule. Now nobody thinks it means that if they pull the trigger repeatedly on a gun with no ammo they will cause an empty gun to occasionally fire a shot or two after cycling through it many time. It means always treating it as such to avoid any slipups from when it is "not loaded" when it has one in the chamber even after removing the magazine, one loaded from the magazine after clearing the chamber before removing the magazine, etc. The costs of treating an empty gun you don't intend to use as loaded are nothing compared to a mishandling so it is perfectly rational. In this case it could be argued a similiar thing for the company. Assuming they currently dominate search when there are up and coming ones, subsections which don't technically fit the same category and can take them by surprise (voice assistants like Alexa taking that role is quite optimistic but plauisble enough that consumers could wind up preferring it), or similiar? It would be "monopolistic" in that it helps keep them on top but "anybody" can self-delude to drive their actions so it isn't anticompetitive any more than say being the only jeweler in the country with fifty years of experience is.
  - goodluckchuck 6y ago
    Everything is evidence of something. It’s just up to the jury to decide what that something is.
  - ErikVandeWater 6y ago
    > so engineers are encouraged to use more accurate words These words aren't more accurate in all cases. In some cases these substitutions will be/are used they are less accurate or misleading.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  I think the main message is “Assume every document will become public.” It's not a natural thing to think about when messaging with a teammate.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I feel like in this case, regulators should be able to re-substitute any of the "good" terms, with the "bad" terms when citing email evidence, since clearly, Google has now shown that phrases like "valuable to users" are synonyms in their parlance for "network effects".
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Not exactly. The key idea of the training is that rank-and-file SWEs don't realize that words have legal meanings separate from their colloquial meanings, and they can cause undue trouble for the company and for themselves with poor word-choice. It's more about "Don't say the product is 'dominating the market' when you don't have any idea what your product's percent share is in the market or, for that matter, how 'market' is defined, because if your email comes out in a subpoena it won't come out in the context that makes it clear you're talking out your ass." Doug Melamed's comments in the article have the right idea: """ “It’s not just trying to hide the truth, it’s really trying to avoid the use of inflammatory language,” said Melamed, a former acting assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division at the U.S. Department of Justice. “The use of the word ‘market’ could be very innocent, but it could be misleading and provocative to an antitrust enforcer. Antitrust enforcers really get exercised when they think someone dominates a market.” """
  - akersten 6y ago
    Right. People are reading into this way too much, in reality it looks like pretty standard "don't use legalese when you're not a lawyer" type training that I've seen at every BigCo.
    - mountainb 6y ago
      The Hal Varian quote there is a good illustration of this. If it was an attorney representing Google talking over e-mail, such an aside would be protected by attorney-client privilege and would not have been subject to discovery. It is a banal and funny comment that would have been fine to make in-person. It should not have been made in writing. This is why stuff like Slack is like opening a Lebanese fertilizer storage warehouse right next to your fireworks factory. It is just stupid to make even more of your company communications subject to discovery. Email and note-taking software is bad and dangerous enough.
hawktheslayer 6y ago
I'm now imagining Sundar walking around the Google offices with the buzzer from the Taboo game.
kome 6y ago
We reached the big tech version of Orwell's Politics and the English Language... https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  When it comes to legal jargon, we've always been there. There aren't really "magic words" in law, but there are words that carry legal meaning and the meaning can be misinterpreted when one sees the word out of context in a subpoena'd document.
jawns 6y ago
There is always going to be some gray line that, if crossed, gets you into antitrust territory, and Alphabet is incentivized to get as close to that line as possible without going over it. And it's large enough to invest considerable resources into figuring out just how close to the line it can get. That's why language like this matters so much to Alphabet. When you're operating close to the line, even if you haven't gone over it, you don't want to give anybody any reason to suggest you're an inch further than you actually are.
Afforess 6y ago
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, etc. (for example: Google Reader could not be spun off because it assumed things about Google's infrastructure + libraries.) So Google arrives at this strange position where medium-yet-small profitable products can't be spun off or divested because of Google's secret sauce (their internal infrastructure). So Google kills successful products instead, because it isn't interested in scaling up an only _modestly_ successful product. This is insane and a sign that something is deeply wrong in Google. 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.
- nojito 6y ago
  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.
  - FrojoS 6y ago
    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) to get the result they would have if there were no ads, or if people would type 'nike.com' into the address bar instead of 'nike'.
    - dehrmann 6y ago
      > 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.
nabla9 6y ago
Google knows exactly what the problem is even if it fights it.
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jefftk 6y ago
One of the leaked documents this article is based on explains a lot more of the background: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7016657-Five-Rules-of-Thumb-for-Written-Communications.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7016657-Five-Rules-o... (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
monkeydust 6y ago
This is common, any big size tech company with a good antitrust lawyer would do something like this. Nothing shocking about this at all.
- monkeydust 6y ago
  In fact suprised they have only just done this!
blocked_again 6y ago
> We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share,” that document says Now that this document is out, can't the government just map their fancy words back to the original word using this doc as a map?
- pwinnski 6y ago
  Not easily, because how do you separate the now-two uses of "people prefer Google search?" Sometimes they mean "market share" and sometimes they mean "people prefer Google search," and there's now no way to tease them apart reliably.
  - shadeslayer_ 6y ago
    If it were so, how is it possible for the Google employees to tell them apart?
    - pwinnski 6y ago
      Right, exactly. They don't want employees talking about market share or dominance at all!
fortran77 6y ago
Every publicly traded company I've ever worked for made similar requests of words we shouldn't use, including "dominant" when talking about one of our products that had a large market share. I don't think this caution is unique to Google.
dooglius 6y ago
There was a similar rule when I was at Microsoft: I'm paraphrasing, but we couldn't talk about beating the competition, we had to just frame things in a specific way.
Reedx 6y ago
Isn't this just a form of theater? Word swapping doesn't change anything about the actual reality.
- Minor49er 6y ago
  Exactly. The title even notes that this is simply a move to head off regulators
ta20200710 6y ago
At Amazon, all employees are trained not to use the words: "marketplace", "platform", and a few others.
- one2know 6y ago
  Amazon's products are identified by a key made of marketplace and ASIN, so that's strange. Amazons "focus on the customer" principle turned out to be sham as they are acutely focused on their competitors, whether Quidsi, Walmart, or Amazon sellers.
gniv 6y ago
Isn’t this standard practice in big corps? These trainings are usually contracted to third parties and they tend to have similar content with small customizations for each company.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It's standard practice to tell employees things like "you shouldn't discuss these sensitive topics over email" or "we're philosophically opposed to lock-in so don't say our users are locked in". But I've worked in a couple of big tech corps, and I don't remember ever being handed a specific list of euphemisms I should use. (After all, what's the point of the euphemisms if an official document describes what they really mean?)
andrewstuart2 6y ago
This isn't really uncommon. Part of my training at my current job for a large company which is decidedly not a monopoly includes these kind of suggestions, definitely directed towards avoiding anti-competitive legal issues. Honestly I think you could almost argue that it's helpful to change the language, because it keeps focus off of "crushing the competition" and on "serving the users best" (IIRC that's an exact example from my training). Language matters in law, yes, but language also impacts company culture.
nxc18 6y ago
I wonder where the line is. Is it ok for a startup like slack to attempt to 'kill email'? Is it ok for a startup like Slack to try to 'destroy' email? What about destroying Outlook specifically? I'm also wondering to what degree this would apply if Google didn't have so many products; would it be ok for Gmail employees to destroy Outlook if Gmail was its own company, separate from all the rest? As a personally competitive person, I tend to be motivated by a drive to destroy the competition and deprive them of business (through fantastic products and great customer service), whether that competition is internal or external to the business. The existence of upstart competitors is explicitly licensed by the failure of established competitors to failing to serve their customers well. If you work at a place like Microsoft Office in 2010, do you just continue to excuse the existence of things like Google Docs? Would it be wrong to destroy their business prospects by getting in on the online collaborative editing game? Would it have been wrong to do so in 2003, when internal engineers prototyped it, before Google Docs was released? Many companies that were dominant have seen their near-monopoly positions eroded by new entrants; I can't help but think they were hurt by lack of a drive to destroy the competition and keep it that way. One example seems to be Adobe Illustrator and Sketch. It would have been better for consumers if Adobe just came out with its newer tools like XD, rather than waiting for Sketch to force their hand. I'm wondering where the line is between healthy competitive drive and anticompetitive behavior/thinking.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  It is ok for a startup to want to 'kill' competitors. Regulators don't care if companies WANT to establish a monopoly. They only care if they succeed.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    What if years later you do succeed?
    - nkingsy 6y ago
      Regulators are looking for language that abuses an existing monopoly. Intent to create a monopoly is not evidence for the existence of one.
flak48 6y ago
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 monopoly and not a monopoly by simply increasing the definition and size of the market that the company is operating in. (And how companies will generally try to avoid being classified as monopolies this way) e.g. Google is a monopoly if you consider online advertising as the market, but if you stretch the market to all advertising (including print, radio, TV and billboards), Google might not be considered one. Similarly Amazon in the e-commerce market vs general retail.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  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 products for our customers. Staying focused on the latter goal is long term better business and better global citizenship. I think saying that Google does this to "head off regulators" is not really fair. That's like saying "asdfasgasdgasdg pays their taxes to head off the IRS." I guess? In some sense we all follow the law partly in order to avoid the consequences of not doing so but it seems pejorative to say it this way. It makes it sound like there are a lot of other people who are paying their taxes out of the goodness of their hearts, but I'm the bad person who is only doing so to avoid legal consequences.
  - cma 6y ago
    > Btw, in the trainings I've taken, it's not just about avoiding specific words, but avoiding the thoughts behind those words. It could be to keep the trainings themselves from looking bad during discovery.
Aunche 6y ago
Anyone who has ever worked in trading in the past decade should be familiar with these sort of rules. Anything that you say that can remotely be interpreted as manipulating the market will get you written up or possibly fired. It could be something as innocuous as "Tesla's valuation is insane right now."
- hbogert 6y ago
  as in the Billions tv-series when they actually do influence the market, they'd say: "I am not uncertain that [blabla]"
compiler-guy 6y ago
If 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 it is unfortunate that the lawyers can do it. But It happens in every field, really.
- FrojoS 6y ago
  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.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    or there[sic] 10th Another reason to be wary of making corrections to someone else's work: Muphry's Law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law FWIW when commenting on my phone, like I usually do, the autocorrect and I make some really cringeworthy typos and substitutions too.
- unishark 6y ago
  All of these miscommunications are not a problem ultimately because this is the nature of communication. And lawyers especially know this. The rule is silly because the idea was silly from the start. Some companies got themselves in trouble in the news due to their work emails. Let's pay someone (too much money) to establish some rules. That overpaid person now has to come up with something to justify getting that money. Result: a bunch of silliness and common sense wrapped up in a new training hassle for everyone.
mc32 6y ago
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?
- DenisM 6y ago
  Presumably lawyers who penned these rules understand that one set of words is a lot easier to interpret favorably in court than the other. It doesn't matter what the "feds" think, only the court's opinion is relevant to the outcome.
MrZongle2 6y ago
This is doubleplusgood.
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derryrover 6y ago
So being a monopolist comes with quite the potential costs. Employees now have to memorize meaningless, if not just plain wrong, synonyms. Not to talk about the miscommunication this might cause. Did any of you working for big-corp ever experience problems caused by this language use?
- d1zzy 6y ago
  This is standard "avoid risky legal language" training at any big company. Whether they might have a monopoly or not.
jacquesm 6y ago
I'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 to the point where your only options are to either see a good portion of your mail undelivered or join the borg then you've just turned yourself into a monopoly. The better way to avoid being labelled a monopoly is to try very hard to play nice with other eco-system players.
- jquery 6y ago
  I think this maps to most people’s non-legalistic idea of what a monopoly is too.
- freedomben 6y ago
  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.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I think Apple is probably the least-worst-offender amongst the FAANG group right now, but I'd definitely argue Apple is a monopoly by this definition. Nearly every business industry has to have an app these days. Imagine a bank not having mobile banking available from iOS in the United States. They'd literally lose customers over it. So for many industries, you must have an iOS app, and to have an iOS app, you must go through the App Store, and you must give 30% of your app revenue to Apple.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    See that other thread on the homepage right now. Hes, they are the least-worst but that does not make them close to good.
bitL 6y ago
Is this from The Onion? How are they going to communicate efficiently? Are they going to pass each mail through a safespeak-to-efficientspeak translator? Some automatic transformer mail plugin digging out the real meaning of sentences?
brownbat 6y ago
Reminded me of Hal Varian talking about Google's dominance and (dismissing any role of) network effects back in 2008: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.htm... They were pretty on message even a decade ago.
tyingq 6y ago
I immediately thought of mafia code words they would use to defeat wiretaps. Like: Among the lines used were: "The sheep need shearing ... the shears need sharpening" or "The hay is ready." The Italian police said they do not believe the mafia members were discussing agricultural matters. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-head-of-the-sicilian-mafia-used-sheep-code-to-communicate-2015-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-head-of-the-sicilian-maf...
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rpastuszak 6y ago
> “Alphabet gets sued a lot, and we have our fair share of regulatory investigations,” reads another. “Assume every document will become public.” :)
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  The smiley face was supposed to mean "gotta appreciate the irony of that statement". I should've been more clear I suppose.
throwawaysea 6y ago
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.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Because conglomerate is a technical term. They aren't making Google washing machines or google munitions. GE is an actual conglomerate.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    The definition is simple though. "A conglomerate is a multi-industry company". Google is in search, advertisement, video, music, hardware, productivity software, cloud, cars, etc. These are a substantial piece of the modern economy and if we aren't calling that "multi-industry", I am not sure th term has meaning.
smadge 6y ago
"Assume every document will become public"
ponker 6y ago
Oh jeez you’re not supposed to write this shit down. Learn from the Wall Street guys and send emails that say “call me”
munificent 6y ago
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-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.
- bravo22 6y ago
  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.
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    > Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. What the modern world has is corporatism, not capitalism, and so profit is the primary motivator. Competition gets in the way of profit by making production and pricing more efficient, so profit-seeking stifles competition and leads to monopoly. Quite unfortunately there is no way to align the incentives of competition and self-interest; profit and self-interest are naturally strongly aligned.
Nasrudith 6y ago
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.
salawat 6y ago
I find that if you can't speak frankly and avoid trouble, then you need to give a long hard thought to what you're doing. A terd is still a terd by any other name.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." -- Eric Schmidt, FormerGoogle CEO, 2009 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...
nikolaipaul 6y ago
The day a company makes words taboo, is a good day to leave.
Nginx487 6y ago
I know this is not much, but when I joined de-Googlefication initiative, I felt it's a right thing to do. Firefox with uBlock Origin, DuckDuckGo, Lineage OS on the smartphone. When I have to use Google products, say Maps or YouTube,I do it from separate "compartment". It's not that much. But when I stopped feeling like I'm a victim of strangely sophisticated, odd and dystopian evil, openly claiming "we are the internet", killing companies and products, I felt like I'm a part of a small, statistically insignificant, but determined and well-informed resistance.
- judge2020 6y ago
  I don't see how this is relevant to the article. Does every submission referring to Google need a thread about how to stop using their products?
grawprog 6y ago
>We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share, >Instead of “market,” employees may say “industry,” “space,” “area,” or simply cite the region, according to the presentation. Sometimes I feel like people take language far too literally and forget that the point of.language is communication and intent, changing the language really doesn't change the meaning behind anything, but because we live in a world where every word is being taken increasingly literally without any search for intent or meaning, we end up with utter nonsense like this.
buss 6y ago
This same guidance is at every very large company. What a nothingburger
cromwellian 6y ago
The real gist is you should assume all internal communication will one day be cited (even out of context) in front of a Congressional committee, so even what you think is harmless speculation, a joke, a casual opinion, or even sarcasm, could have you testifying under oath.
cabalamat 6y ago
> “We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share,” that document says. Then wouldn't a court, whenever it sees "User Preference for Google Search" or any other similar euphemism, simply treat it as meaning "market share"?
linsomniac 6y ago
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.
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DenisM 6y ago
> "Bad: the defensive rationale for this acquisition is clear: Get ahead of the competition and cut off their access to the target's product" > "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.
danaliv 6y ago
Wow. Read this the other way around, and they all but admit that the purpose of integrating acquisitions into Google is to cut off access to competitors.
WalterBright 6y ago
Franklin Roosevelt did not allow anyone to make recordings or take minutes in White House meetings. Historians find this very frustrating, but all you need for a rationale for that is what happened to Nixon.
moron4hire 6y ago
"Certainly don't change your behavior! By all means, continue to lie, cheat, and steal. Just make sure you come up with code words for it."
anigbrowl 6y ago
Stick a fork in it, it's done. Once a corporation starts lying to itself and employees are expected to participate, it's doomed. I agree that a breakup would be the best thing for the individual units at this point.
nige123 6y ago
"Don't be Evil" -> "Don't appear Evil"?
xenonite 6y ago
"Dominance rule" is a common term in the science of combinatorial optimization. It felt a awkward when I first heard it, but the word fits pretty well to its meaning. I don't think it is a good idea to change such common terms because of such trends or even "Excel" (due to Excel's autocorrect, certain gene names are taboo and get renamed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385)
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WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
Employees "are further cautioned never to print or hand out their slides". This inspires a brand new thought; I should find ways to surreptitiously record Google sales meetings.
- canada_dry 6y ago
  > surreptitiously record meetings With the advent of work-from-home via Zoom, I suspect we're going to see much more content of this type being released by disgruntled employees.
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437 points by caution 6y ago

I have worked in blockchain / cryptocurrency for years. Remember team - it's a "utility token", not a "security"! Words matter!

baryphonic 6y ago

Reminds me of Peter Thiel's observation that monopolies lie.[1] Also, IANAL but I can't imagine a memo/training that says not to use certain words because of "regulatory issues" is not itself evidence that Google knows of its own monopolistic status. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...

shadowgovt 6y ago
Surprisingly, it's not. It's evidence that Google knows some words are open to misinterpretation, so engineers are encouraged to use more accurate words and not stray into words with colloquial meanings differing from their legal meanings (because subpoenas lack context). If I say I'm "killing it" this week, I'm not committing homicide.
- xondono 6y ago
  Well, I’ve never known any colloquial use of “network effects”, it’s quite the technical term with well defined meaning.
  - mthoms 6y ago
    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 dishonesty.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      An awful lot of Googlers don't work in search.
      - mthoms 6y ago
        Right, and they seem to be encouraged to be dishonest about Google's position in search. Anyways, a majority of Google's non-search products are intrinsically tied to their search product so it's still relevant.
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      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.
      - mthoms 6y ago
        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).
        Nasrudith 6y ago
        Bizzarely heurestic delusions and self-deception can be useful for taking to heart something which isn't literally true. Take "the gun is always loaded" rule. Now nobody thinks it means that if they pull the trigger repeatedly on a gun with no ammo they will cause an empty gun to occasionally fire a shot or two after cycling through it many time. It means always treating it as such to avoid any slipups from when it is "not loaded" when it has one in the chamber even after removing the magazine, one loaded from the magazine after clearing the chamber before removing the magazine, etc. The costs of treating an empty gun you don't intend to use as loaded are nothing compared to a mishandling so it is perfectly rational. In this case it could be argued a similiar thing for the company. Assuming they currently dominate search when there are up and coming ones, subsections which don't technically fit the same category and can take them by surprise (voice assistants like Alexa taking that role is quite optimistic but plauisble enough that consumers could wind up preferring it), or similiar? It would be "monopolistic" in that it helps keep them on top but "anybody" can self-delude to drive their actions so it isn't anticompetitive any more than say being the only jeweler in the country with fifty years of experience is.
- goodluckchuck 6y ago
  Everything is evidence of something. It’s just up to the jury to decide what that something is.
- ErikVandeWater 6y ago
  > so engineers are encouraged to use more accurate words These words aren't more accurate in all cases. In some cases these substitutions will be/are used they are less accurate or misleading.
BurningFrog 6y ago
I think the main message is “Assume every document will become public.” It's not a natural thing to think about when messaging with a teammate.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

I feel like in this case, regulators should be able to re-substitute any of the "good" terms, with the "bad" terms when citing email evidence, since clearly, Google has now shown that phrases like "valuable to users" are synonyms in their parlance for "network effects".

shadowgovt 6y ago
Not exactly. The key idea of the training is that rank-and-file SWEs don't realize that words have legal meanings separate from their colloquial meanings, and they can cause undue trouble for the company and for themselves with poor word-choice. It's more about "Don't say the product is 'dominating the market' when you don't have any idea what your product's percent share is in the market or, for that matter, how 'market' is defined, because if your email comes out in a subpoena it won't come out in the context that makes it clear you're talking out your ass." Doug Melamed's comments in the article have the right idea: """ “It’s not just trying to hide the truth, it’s really trying to avoid the use of inflammatory language,” said Melamed, a former acting assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division at the U.S. Department of Justice. “The use of the word ‘market’ could be very innocent, but it could be misleading and provocative to an antitrust enforcer. Antitrust enforcers really get exercised when they think someone dominates a market.” """
- akersten 6y ago
  Right. People are reading into this way too much, in reality it looks like pretty standard "don't use legalese when you're not a lawyer" type training that I've seen at every BigCo.
  - mountainb 6y ago
    The Hal Varian quote there is a good illustration of this. If it was an attorney representing Google talking over e-mail, such an aside would be protected by attorney-client privilege and would not have been subject to discovery. It is a banal and funny comment that would have been fine to make in-person. It should not have been made in writing. This is why stuff like Slack is like opening a Lebanese fertilizer storage warehouse right next to your fireworks factory. It is just stupid to make even more of your company communications subject to discovery. Email and note-taking software is bad and dangerous enough.

hawktheslayer 6y ago

I'm now imagining Sundar walking around the Google offices with the buzzer from the Taboo game.

kome 6y ago

We reached the big tech version of Orwell's Politics and the English Language... https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

shadowgovt 6y ago
When it comes to legal jargon, we've always been there. There aren't really "magic words" in law, but there are words that carry legal meaning and the meaning can be misinterpreted when one sees the word out of context in a subpoena'd document.

jawns 6y ago

There is always going to be some gray line that, if crossed, gets you into antitrust territory, and Alphabet is incentivized to get as close to that line as possible without going over it. And it's large enough to invest considerable resources into figuring out just how close to the line it can get. That's why language like this matters so much to Alphabet. When you're operating close to the line, even if you haven't gone over it, you don't want to give anybody any reason to suggest you're an inch further than you actually are.

Afforess 6y ago

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, etc. (for example: Google Reader could not be spun off because it assumed things about Google's infrastructure + libraries.) So Google arrives at this strange position where medium-yet-small profitable products can't be spun off or divested because of Google's secret sauce (their internal infrastructure). So Google kills successful products instead, because it isn't interested in scaling up an only _modestly_ successful product. This is insane and a sign that something is deeply wrong in Google. 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.

nojito 6y ago
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.
- FrojoS 6y ago
  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) to get the result they would have if there were no ads, or if people would type 'nike.com' into the address bar instead of 'nike'.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    > 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.

nabla9 6y ago

Google knows exactly what the problem is even if it fights it.

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jefftk 6y ago

One of the leaked documents this article is based on explains a lot more of the background: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7016657-Five-Rules-of-Thumb-for-Written-Communications.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7016657-Five-Rules-o... (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

monkeydust 6y ago

This is common, any big size tech company with a good antitrust lawyer would do something like this. Nothing shocking about this at all.

monkeydust 6y ago
In fact suprised they have only just done this!

blocked_again 6y ago

> We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share,” that document says Now that this document is out, can't the government just map their fancy words back to the original word using this doc as a map?

pwinnski 6y ago
Not easily, because how do you separate the now-two uses of "people prefer Google search?" Sometimes they mean "market share" and sometimes they mean "people prefer Google search," and there's now no way to tease them apart reliably.
- shadeslayer_ 6y ago
  If it were so, how is it possible for the Google employees to tell them apart?
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    Right, exactly. They don't want employees talking about market share or dominance at all!

fortran77 6y ago

Every publicly traded company I've ever worked for made similar requests of words we shouldn't use, including "dominant" when talking about one of our products that had a large market share. I don't think this caution is unique to Google.

dooglius 6y ago

There was a similar rule when I was at Microsoft: I'm paraphrasing, but we couldn't talk about beating the competition, we had to just frame things in a specific way.

Reedx 6y ago

Isn't this just a form of theater? Word swapping doesn't change anything about the actual reality.

Minor49er 6y ago
Exactly. The title even notes that this is simply a move to head off regulators

ta20200710 6y ago

At Amazon, all employees are trained not to use the words: "marketplace", "platform", and a few others.

one2know 6y ago
Amazon's products are identified by a key made of marketplace and ASIN, so that's strange. Amazons "focus on the customer" principle turned out to be sham as they are acutely focused on their competitors, whether Quidsi, Walmart, or Amazon sellers.

gniv 6y ago

Isn’t this standard practice in big corps? These trainings are usually contracted to third parties and they tend to have similar content with small customizations for each company.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It's standard practice to tell employees things like "you shouldn't discuss these sensitive topics over email" or "we're philosophically opposed to lock-in so don't say our users are locked in". But I've worked in a couple of big tech corps, and I don't remember ever being handed a specific list of euphemisms I should use. (After all, what's the point of the euphemisms if an official document describes what they really mean?)

andrewstuart2 6y ago

This isn't really uncommon. Part of my training at my current job for a large company which is decidedly not a monopoly includes these kind of suggestions, definitely directed towards avoiding anti-competitive legal issues. Honestly I think you could almost argue that it's helpful to change the language, because it keeps focus off of "crushing the competition" and on "serving the users best" (IIRC that's an exact example from my training). Language matters in law, yes, but language also impacts company culture.

nxc18 6y ago

I wonder where the line is. Is it ok for a startup like slack to attempt to 'kill email'? Is it ok for a startup like Slack to try to 'destroy' email? What about destroying Outlook specifically? I'm also wondering to what degree this would apply if Google didn't have so many products; would it be ok for Gmail employees to destroy Outlook if Gmail was its own company, separate from all the rest? As a personally competitive person, I tend to be motivated by a drive to destroy the competition and deprive them of business (through fantastic products and great customer service), whether that competition is internal or external to the business. The existence of upstart competitors is explicitly licensed by the failure of established competitors to failing to serve their customers well. If you work at a place like Microsoft Office in 2010, do you just continue to excuse the existence of things like Google Docs? Would it be wrong to destroy their business prospects by getting in on the online collaborative editing game? Would it have been wrong to do so in 2003, when internal engineers prototyped it, before Google Docs was released? Many companies that were dominant have seen their near-monopoly positions eroded by new entrants; I can't help but think they were hurt by lack of a drive to destroy the competition and keep it that way. One example seems to be Adobe Illustrator and Sketch. It would have been better for consumers if Adobe just came out with its newer tools like XD, rather than waiting for Sketch to force their hand. I'm wondering where the line is between healthy competitive drive and anticompetitive behavior/thinking.

cortesoft 6y ago
It is ok for a startup to want to 'kill' competitors. Regulators don't care if companies WANT to establish a monopoly. They only care if they succeed.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  What if years later you do succeed?
  - nkingsy 6y ago
    Regulators are looking for language that abuses an existing monopoly. Intent to create a monopoly is not evidence for the existence of one.

flak48 6y ago

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 monopoly and not a monopoly by simply increasing the definition and size of the market that the company is operating in. (And how companies will generally try to avoid being classified as monopolies this way) e.g. Google is a monopoly if you consider online advertising as the market, but if you stretch the market to all advertising (including print, radio, TV and billboards), Google might not be considered one. Similarly Amazon in the e-commerce market vs general retail.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
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 products for our customers. Staying focused on the latter goal is long term better business and better global citizenship. I think saying that Google does this to "head off regulators" is not really fair. That's like saying "asdfasgasdgasdg pays their taxes to head off the IRS." I guess? In some sense we all follow the law partly in order to avoid the consequences of not doing so but it seems pejorative to say it this way. It makes it sound like there are a lot of other people who are paying their taxes out of the goodness of their hearts, but I'm the bad person who is only doing so to avoid legal consequences.
- cma 6y ago
  > Btw, in the trainings I've taken, it's not just about avoiding specific words, but avoiding the thoughts behind those words. It could be to keep the trainings themselves from looking bad during discovery.

Aunche 6y ago

Anyone who has ever worked in trading in the past decade should be familiar with these sort of rules. Anything that you say that can remotely be interpreted as manipulating the market will get you written up or possibly fired. It could be something as innocuous as "Tesla's valuation is insane right now."

hbogert 6y ago
as in the Billions tv-series when they actually do influence the market, they'd say: "I am not uncertain that [blabla]"

compiler-guy 6y ago

If 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 it is unfortunate that the lawyers can do it. But It happens in every field, really.

FrojoS 6y ago
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.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  or there[sic] 10th Another reason to be wary of making corrections to someone else's work: Muphry's Law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law FWIW when commenting on my phone, like I usually do, the autocorrect and I make some really cringeworthy typos and substitutions too.
unishark 6y ago
All of these miscommunications are not a problem ultimately because this is the nature of communication. And lawyers especially know this. The rule is silly because the idea was silly from the start. Some companies got themselves in trouble in the news due to their work emails. Let's pay someone (too much money) to establish some rules. That overpaid person now has to come up with something to justify getting that money. Result: a bunch of silliness and common sense wrapped up in a new training hassle for everyone.

mc32 6y ago

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?

DenisM 6y ago
Presumably lawyers who penned these rules understand that one set of words is a lot easier to interpret favorably in court than the other. It doesn't matter what the "feds" think, only the court's opinion is relevant to the outcome.

MrZongle2 6y ago

This is doubleplusgood.

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derryrover 6y ago

So being a monopolist comes with quite the potential costs. Employees now have to memorize meaningless, if not just plain wrong, synonyms. Not to talk about the miscommunication this might cause. Did any of you working for big-corp ever experience problems caused by this language use?

d1zzy 6y ago
This is standard "avoid risky legal language" training at any big company. Whether they might have a monopoly or not.

jacquesm 6y ago

I'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 to the point where your only options are to either see a good portion of your mail undelivered or join the borg then you've just turned yourself into a monopoly. The better way to avoid being labelled a monopoly is to try very hard to play nice with other eco-system players.

jquery 6y ago
I think this maps to most people’s non-legalistic idea of what a monopoly is too.
freedomben 6y ago
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.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I think Apple is probably the least-worst-offender amongst the FAANG group right now, but I'd definitely argue Apple is a monopoly by this definition. Nearly every business industry has to have an app these days. Imagine a bank not having mobile banking available from iOS in the United States. They'd literally lose customers over it. So for many industries, you must have an iOS app, and to have an iOS app, you must go through the App Store, and you must give 30% of your app revenue to Apple.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  See that other thread on the homepage right now. Hes, they are the least-worst but that does not make them close to good.

bitL 6y ago

Is this from The Onion? How are they going to communicate efficiently? Are they going to pass each mail through a safespeak-to-efficientspeak translator? Some automatic transformer mail plugin digging out the real meaning of sentences?

brownbat 6y ago

Reminded me of Hal Varian talking about Google's dominance and (dismissing any role of) network effects back in 2008: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.htm... They were pretty on message even a decade ago.

tyingq 6y ago

I immediately thought of mafia code words they would use to defeat wiretaps. Like: Among the lines used were: "The sheep need shearing ... the shears need sharpening" or "The hay is ready." The Italian police said they do not believe the mafia members were discussing agricultural matters. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-head-of-the-sicilian-mafia-used-sheep-code-to-communicate-2015-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-head-of-the-sicilian-maf...

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rpastuszak 6y ago

> “Alphabet gets sued a lot, and we have our fair share of regulatory investigations,” reads another. “Assume every document will become public.” :)

rpastuszak 6y ago
The smiley face was supposed to mean "gotta appreciate the irony of that statement". I should've been more clear I suppose.

throwawaysea 6y ago

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.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Because conglomerate is a technical term. They aren't making Google washing machines or google munitions. GE is an actual conglomerate.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  The definition is simple though. "A conglomerate is a multi-industry company". Google is in search, advertisement, video, music, hardware, productivity software, cloud, cars, etc. These are a substantial piece of the modern economy and if we aren't calling that "multi-industry", I am not sure th term has meaning.

smadge 6y ago

"Assume every document will become public"

ponker 6y ago

Oh jeez you’re not supposed to write this shit down. Learn from the Wall Street guys and send emails that say “call me”

munificent 6y ago

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-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.

bravo22 6y ago
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.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  > Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. What the modern world has is corporatism, not capitalism, and so profit is the primary motivator. Competition gets in the way of profit by making production and pricing more efficient, so profit-seeking stifles competition and leads to monopoly. Quite unfortunately there is no way to align the incentives of competition and self-interest; profit and self-interest are naturally strongly aligned.

Nasrudith 6y ago

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.

salawat 6y ago

I find that if you can't speak frankly and avoid trouble, then you need to give a long hard thought to what you're doing. A terd is still a terd by any other name.

dredmorbius 6y ago
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." -- Eric Schmidt, FormerGoogle CEO, 2009 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

nikolaipaul 6y ago

The day a company makes words taboo, is a good day to leave.

Nginx487 6y ago

I know this is not much, but when I joined de-Googlefication initiative, I felt it's a right thing to do. Firefox with uBlock Origin, DuckDuckGo, Lineage OS on the smartphone. When I have to use Google products, say Maps or YouTube,I do it from separate "compartment". It's not that much. But when I stopped feeling like I'm a victim of strangely sophisticated, odd and dystopian evil, openly claiming "we are the internet", killing companies and products, I felt like I'm a part of a small, statistically insignificant, but determined and well-informed resistance.

judge2020 6y ago
I don't see how this is relevant to the article. Does every submission referring to Google need a thread about how to stop using their products?

grawprog 6y ago

>We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share, >Instead of “market,” employees may say “industry,” “space,” “area,” or simply cite the region, according to the presentation. Sometimes I feel like people take language far too literally and forget that the point of.language is communication and intent, changing the language really doesn't change the meaning behind anything, but because we live in a world where every word is being taken increasingly literally without any search for intent or meaning, we end up with utter nonsense like this.

buss 6y ago

This same guidance is at every very large company. What a nothingburger

cromwellian 6y ago

The real gist is you should assume all internal communication will one day be cited (even out of context) in front of a Congressional committee, so even what you think is harmless speculation, a joke, a casual opinion, or even sarcasm, could have you testifying under oath.

cabalamat 6y ago

> “We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share,” that document says. Then wouldn't a court, whenever it sees "User Preference for Google Search" or any other similar euphemism, simply treat it as meaning "market share"?

linsomniac 6y ago

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.

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DenisM 6y ago

> "Bad: the defensive rationale for this acquisition is clear: Get ahead of the competition and cut off their access to the target's product" > "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.

danaliv 6y ago

Wow. Read this the other way around, and they all but admit that the purpose of integrating acquisitions into Google is to cut off access to competitors.

WalterBright 6y ago

Franklin Roosevelt did not allow anyone to make recordings or take minutes in White House meetings. Historians find this very frustrating, but all you need for a rationale for that is what happened to Nixon.

moron4hire 6y ago

"Certainly don't change your behavior! By all means, continue to lie, cheat, and steal. Just make sure you come up with code words for it."

anigbrowl 6y ago

Stick a fork in it, it's done. Once a corporation starts lying to itself and employees are expected to participate, it's doomed. I agree that a breakup would be the best thing for the individual units at this point.

nige123 6y ago

"Don't be Evil" -> "Don't appear Evil"?

xenonite 6y ago

"Dominance rule" is a common term in the science of combinatorial optimization. It felt a awkward when I first heard it, but the word fits pretty well to its meaning. I don't think it is a good idea to change such common terms because of such trends or even "Excel" (due to Excel's autocorrect, certain gene names are taboo and get renamed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385)

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WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

Employees "are further cautioned never to print or hand out their slides". This inspires a brand new thought; I should find ways to surreptitiously record Google sales meetings.

canada_dry 6y ago
> surreptitiously record meetings With the advent of work-from-home via Zoom, I suspect we're going to see much more content of this type being released by disgruntled employees.

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