8 ms·
So that was a lie
by yellow_lead 4y ago
So that was a lie
- awill 4y agoProbably the reason they had to give refunds, or they'd get sued, and this would be evidence #1 against Google
- taytus 4y agoIt’s really a lie if everyone knows it is a lie thou?
- judge2020 4y agoWhat is the social media person supposed to say in this case? "we're working on a blog post about Stadia shutting down that'll be released in 2 months"? Even if Phil Harrison himself were the one running that Twitter account, he probably knew it was destined to shut down but didn't have anything official on when or the details of the shutdown.
- yellow_lead 4y agoHow about nothing?
- bccdee 4y agoSomething evasive in the vein of "Stadia represents a significant investment and Google has not announced any plans to scale back Stadia. We can't comment on rumours and speculation."
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> What is the social media person supposed to say in this case? If they can't find peace with everybody calling them a professional liar, they should quit their job and find an honest line of work.
- georgeecollins 4y ago"We're proud of our Stadia experience and we are working hard on projects for it." That would not be as misleading as we are not going anywhere. Anyone who didn't think Stadia was going to shut down at least a year ago was either kind of inexperienced or being paid not to realize the obvious.
- compiler-guy 4y agoThere are also those who knew it was at risk and in danger but thought that it could be saved with hard work and a little luck and were working toward that end.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y agoAfter negative news, it’s pretty safe to assume thr opposite when PR / Marketing says something like “we wont be shutting down” or when a CEO says “there wont be any layoffs”. If you read between the lines, those kind of announcements can usually be a good indicator of the appropriate “time to adapt”, whether that be to prepare for a layoff or to start buying IP on a survivable platform.
- wil421 4y agoA company I worked for moved from the Suburbs to downtown in the city I live in. Local news broke the story right when the deal was signed with the building contractor. For weeks on end they denied it, until they didn’t. Surprise we were always lying to you!
- bink 4y agoThey usually couch it in weasel words such as "we have no plans to conduct layoffs at this time" rather than an outright lie.
- elil17 4y agoThat is an outright lie if they do have plans for layoffs.
- jedmeyers 4y agoOh no, they have a plan to create a plan for layoffs, but as of right now there is no plan to layoff employees.
- ConceptJunkie 4y agoMore realistically, "We don't have a plan for laying off employees at this time. Our plan is for laying off employees next month."
- hansvm 4y ago"at this time" just needs to refer to when the layoffs are happening rather than the existence of a plan.
- coldpie 4y agoYes. Stadia execs lied to their own employees. It's a pattern for the company. This call was followed by a contentious Q&A where the Stadia boss was confronted about his email from just the week before which suggested anything but a wholesale shutdown of the studios. Harrison expressed his regret over the misleading statements made in his previous email, according to four sources with knowledge of the call. When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.” https://kotaku.com/stadia-leadership-praised-development-studios-for-great-1846281384 https://kotaku.com/stadia-leadership-praised-development-stu...
- hinkley 4y agoI'm sure there's some sort of doctor-like logic going on in some heads where you tell the patient everything is going to be fine because the surgery goes better if they aren't freaked out before the anesthesia hits. But with team dynamics getting thrown in I think that narrative sounds noble and glamorous but has little to nothing to do with reality. Instead it's an equal part "I can save this" and "we aren't gonna save this but we need people to stay to help with an orderly shutdown", and the Mushroom Treatment (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit).
- Melatonic 4y agoAt least with the mushroom treatment though you end up with some very tasty and healthy products!
- hinkley 4y agoI am not a product.
- humanistbot 4y ago> I'm sure there's some sort of doctor-like logic going on in some heads where you tell the patient everything is going to be fine because the surgery goes better if they aren't freaked out before the anesthesia hits. That is a clear violation of informed consent. Even if it might lead to better short-term outcomes, over the long-term it leads to degrading trust in doctors. Same with this case. It gives all of us (internal employees, outside devs, businesses, customers) even more reasons to never believe any promise that comes out of the mouth of an Alphabet executive.
- rany_ 4y agoI doubt the social media guy even knew. They were posting promotional tweets just 2 days ago. Source: https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1574790973443522566 https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1574790973443522566
- lupire 4y agoIt's an employee doing a job. The job was to lie to the public for short term gain. Don't have to blame the employee, do have to blame the management.
- hustwindmaple1 4y agoWhy would s/he? S/he is prob. 10 levels below the actual decision maker and sometimes is not even a fulltime employee.
- wpietri 4y agoI doubt it was a lie in the sense that the person who said it believed it to be false. I think this instead falls under Frankfurt's definition of bullshit: speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. But there's a corporate twist here, in that the person saying might have believed it to be true, because some executive also believed it to be true, even though if you take Google as a whole, it was always uncertain. So I think I'd call this "corporate bullshit", where Google as an entity has low regard for the truth as presented by PR mouthpieces, and is thus a dedicated bullshitter.
- canadianwriter 4y agoLike... maybe? Why does it have to be a lie instead of incompetence? They may have totally thought that back then, then changed their mind?
- mrguyorama 4y agoIt's Google. Everyone knew the second Stadia was announced that it would die. It wasn't even a particularly good example of a game streaming service. If you work for Google and were convinced that Stadia was secure for the future, you should reconsider the reality you live in.
- DashAnimal 4y agoSo... Just to get this correct, the social media person who probably isn't privvy to plans affecting their job in two months should have written something along the lines of "were told it's going to be ok, but who even knows with Google"?
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoThat would actually have been hilarious.
- mrguyorama 4y agoMaybe PR teams shouldn't get a free pass to say whatever they want. If your PR team can just lie to the public due to "ignorance" it becomes very very profitable to lie to your own PR team.
- lupire 4y agoThey could just say "we don't comment on future plans" instead of lying to increase sales, aka committing fraud.
- myko 4y agoI've used GeForce Now and Stadia was a lot better than it on my iPad/WiFi What service is better than Stadia at actually running games in the cloud?
- kyrra 4y agoGoogler, opinions are my own. I don't work on Stadia. From what I saw, the Stadia team was working hard on product improvements and adding new games still. So a careful parsing of the sentence is that the Stadia team was still working towards the goals of expanding the service, as the shutdown decision wasn't made yet or told to the team yet.
- gilrain 4y ago> When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.” I encourage you to consider looking for work at a company which respects you; you’re worth it.
- johnnyanmac 4y agoTBF, if Mcdonalds paid people 100k at age 23 to flip burgers, employees would put up with a lot more BS as well. And that salary for a google newgrad is low balling.
- hinkley 4y agoUnfortunately there's a reason teams and people get put on "Double Secret Probation". If consumers find out the team might get shut down they start relying on them less, at which point the probation becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. It got out that one of my favorite restaurants was going to lose their lease for new construction, and didn't have plans to relocate. I moved shortly thereafter and never checked up on them. What actually happened is that the construction project got delayed over a year, and the restaurant stayed, but anyone who didn't live in the immediate vicinity didn't hear about that. Any time I told someone it was still open, the response was happy, but complete surprise. They opened a kind of a cafe with just a fraction of their menu closer to my house, but the location wasn't great (It's worth paying someone to sit around a potential location for hours on multiple days to see what foot traffic is like. If you're across a high traffic street from a high foot traffic area that doesn't mean you'll see foot traffic) and I'm sure by then the rumor of their demise had affected revenue. So bad location and the food wasn't quite as good as at the old location. Probably staff turnover. That slow avalanche took three years to shutter the company, and they probably would have been fine if they'd managed to stay out of the local paper.
- __david__ 4y agoIt depends on when they made the decision. Changing your mind doesn't mean you previously lied, it just means you were wrong. Lying needs intent.
- lupire 4y agoThis is an extremely dangerous attitude. Truth matters, not just whatever feels good.
- laserlight 4y agoIf we collectively stopped believing non-binding statements with no skin in the game, these bullshitters would stop bullshitting.