11 ms·

I'll summarize this for people who don't want to read through the PDF, or aren't familiar with the jargon. It's a discussion between two people, Jerry and Anil

by jhp123 3y ago

I'll summarize this for people who don't want to read through the PDF, or aren't familiar with the jargon. It's a discussion between two people, Jerry and Anil. Anil seems to be representing the Chrome team, and Jerry the Ads team and/or sales. 7 months prior, some feature related to Chrome's omnibox (url/search box) was rolled out, leading to reduced searches ("SQV"). Jerry is asking for this feature to be rolled back (undone) to restore lost revenue. Anil is trying to keep the feature by finding other ways to make up the lost revenue. Anil is opposed to rolling back the feature because it is a user-visible change that was approved by all parties and launched months ago, so it will be frustrating to users to lose the feature and to developers to see their work canned. Anil accelerates the launch of some other features to improve revenue, but Jerry is not satisfied. After some back and forth he sends the final email laying out his case: the revenue impact is too severe, sales is going to miss quota, quarterly earnings will be below forecast, stock price will decline, employees will lose out on stock-based compensation. This last email is cc'ed widely so I think Jerry was trying to build more pressure on Anil/Chrome team. edit: do read the pdf though, there's a lot more detail in it.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Wow, thanks very much for this explanation - I really appreciated it giving me full context before reading the email exchange. It's hard for me to imagine better evidence that Google needs to be broken up than this. Honestly, I think it should basically be forbidden for Ads folks to even talk to the Chrome team. This looks like textbook abuse of monopoly power when you use your dominant position in one area (web browsing) to juice your position in another area (ads). Also, I think it shows the foolishness of any company thinking that "Don't be evil" is a position that can last over time as you grow. I know it's easy to look at Jerry as "the bad guy" in this situation, but he is simply reacting to his incentives ("if we don't make these changes, we miss our sales number, and if we miss our sales numbers, we don't get our bonus"). All big companies eventually revert to their incentive structure once they become big enough. This line of thinking also goes to show why Google has traveled down the enshittification path so strongly over the past 5-10 years. Easy for to me imagine how each little search result change resulted in more revenue and not a significant number of people leaving, until you are left with the situation we have now where the entire first page of any remotely commercial search is just ads, going directly against Google's entire original thesis for their existence in the first place. My guess is the relatively recent change of text from "Ad" to "Sponsored" is because fewer people realize that sponsored means ad.
- changoplatanero 3y ago
  How can chrome be broken off from the rest of google? It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.
  - hamandcheese 3y ago
    Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox and Safari do (bid out the default search engine).
    - fallingknife 3y ago
      So now you have the Chrome team with an even more direct incentive to maximize search volumes at the expense of a good product since that's their revenue source too.
      - to11mtm 3y ago
        That would be a good thing if it drove people away... After the WEI incident chrome is pretty dang tainted to me. I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone...
        warkdarrior 3y ago
        > I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone... I do not know this story. How did the Chromium team force Opera to change rendering engines?
        lightspot21 3y ago
        The same way Microsoft was forced to change to Chromium for Edge - Google forcing Chromium-specific features through the standardization process at a rate exhausting for Microsoft (or any other browser engine implementor) to follow in time without popular sites breaking.
nonethewiser 3y ago
The strategy to appease by finding additional revenue sources seems flawed. Regardless of these additional revenue sources, you're still leaving money on the table by not rolling back. Ideally you roll back and add the additional revenue sources. To be clear, they shouldn't roll back. Because it's shitty. But that's the reason - "It's shitty" - not "we can add additional revenue sources elsewhere too." If you validate ads team's concern for revenue but then dont maximize revenue then you should expect them to be dissatisfied.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Detecting sarcasm online these days is nearly impossible.
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    nice rescue hah
- lozenge 3y ago
  Anil did address that in the earliest message (page 5)
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  It makes sense if there is a threshold for wall street expectations in what is a hit vs a miss
hfjjbf 3y ago
[dead]
mistercheph 3y ago
I'm assuming this related to the omnibox auto-searching alternative providers with default keywords or broadcasting that a user can hit tab to search (e.g. typing wikipedia or youtube in omnibox)
jiveturkey 3y ago
Did they roll back the change? We can argue about pressure all we want. enshittification is a thing, regardless of monopoly.
- nojito 3y ago
  They made google search the default instead of your previous webpage visits.
generationP 3y ago
Could it have been what led to this? https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/6240767/behaviour-of-the-omnibox-changed-how-to-change-back?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/6240767/behaviour-o...
- qingcharles 3y ago
  It sounds like that might be it. I love this. Sales are being whiny bitches because one part of the company improved a product to make it more customer-friendly and their short-term revenue decreased. Without them even once addressing the fact that improving Chrome as a browser will ultimately increase their market share and search volume. It's great to see how shitty decisions are made inside big corps.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Increased market share is a plus for another department that may or may not eventually occur. Major hits to revenue/metrics for ads right now would be clearly documented and immediately material.
quickthrower2 3y ago
What a soul destroying job. One way to make the revenue up is just show Google results when someone types in another URL like https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/. Why not? Makes more SQVs. Oops we thought you wanted to search for that URL!
Waterluvian 3y ago
> sales is going to miss quota This is why I can’t take sales, as an organization, seriously. I mean, I get it. I get how and why. Capitalism. Stock prices. Salaries. But there’s such an inhumanity to deciding upon some number and then making decisions based on that number even if they’re dumb. Decisionmaking reduced to “I’m going miss quota!” I guess this is their own story point hell.
- lazide 3y ago
  And you’ve never winced when releasing a feature to hit a date because you knew the tests weren’t solid? It’s the same thing, except their risks and rewards are very concrete and easy to model.
- pcurve 3y ago
  As someone who failed at sales, I have nothing but respect for people in sales, and people who work in account management that put up with client bull shit and bring home the bacon.
throwaway2037 3y ago
I'm confused by the sentiment of the discussion here. There is so much talk about monopoly. Yes, Chrome has a commanding market lead, but it is not a monopoly in the eyes of US competition law (EU may be different; I am less familiar). It is more like an oligopoly. Mozilla Firefox is a very good alternative; so is Opera; so is Microsoft Edge; so is Apple Safari; so is Brave. Does anyone know if "Jerry's" change to the Omnibox also applied to Chromium? If yes, then this monopoly argument is even weaker. If Google decides to rollback the change, then derivatives of Chromium (Opera, Edge, etc.) can simply re-apply the change into their own fork. I think all this monopoly talk is almost impossible to win any court case because there is real competition and the core is open source. Does anyone know if there have been any substantial legal victories against any software oligopolies where the software is substantially open source and the closed source version is free? I cannot think of any.
- ttt3ts 3y ago
  It isn't about the browser. It is about search and ads which are not free or open source. There are alternatives but Google's market share is ~92% which is similar level to ie when Microsoft faced it's anti trust case. They pay off mozzila & apple to be default search. Bing has 7% market share and they are the only "real" competition. The browser is just one more way google maintains it's core search business. E.g. their recently released topics api
  - yunwal 3y ago
    The claim is that Google is using their dominance in browsers to unfairly drive business to their search/ads product. Yes, google has more market dominance in search but that’s not the reason for the lawsuit.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
Thank you for an entirely different reason. Infinite captcha loop and can't use the archive.ph link.
GoatOfAplomb 3y ago
Also - I don't recognize Jerry, but I do recognize many of the other names on the threads, and they're VPs or SVPs. So there's no argument of "this is just some random Googlers talking before their bosses got involved". These are the bosses. Edit: Jerry is also a VP, per LinkedIn.
wnevets 3y ago
Whenever someone askes how "insert site/app" got worse just point them to this, 9 times out of 10 this is probably the reason.
jerryfromsales 3y ago
[flagged]
Justsignedup 3y ago
Eye opening but not surprising. A company who is building a product who's feature is user-friendly and user-focused but hurts the thing that moves the needle forward for the company is going to be met with heavy resistance. Its like a car company in which the design team makes a design so reliable it'll cut revenue in half due to not selling parts, it can't happen.

by jhp123 3y ago

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Wow, thanks very much for this explanation - I really appreciated it giving me full context before reading the email exchange. It's hard for me to imagine better evidence that Google needs to be broken up than this. Honestly, I think it should basically be forbidden for Ads folks to even talk to the Chrome team. This looks like textbook abuse of monopoly power when you use your dominant position in one area (web browsing) to juice your position in another area (ads). Also, I think it shows the foolishness of any company thinking that "Don't be evil" is a position that can last over time as you grow. I know it's easy to look at Jerry as "the bad guy" in this situation, but he is simply reacting to his incentives ("if we don't make these changes, we miss our sales number, and if we miss our sales numbers, we don't get our bonus"). All big companies eventually revert to their incentive structure once they become big enough. This line of thinking also goes to show why Google has traveled down the enshittification path so strongly over the past 5-10 years. Easy for to me imagine how each little search result change resulted in more revenue and not a significant number of people leaving, until you are left with the situation we have now where the entire first page of any remotely commercial search is just ads, going directly against Google's entire original thesis for their existence in the first place. My guess is the relatively recent change of text from "Ad" to "Sponsored" is because fewer people realize that sponsored means ad.

changoplatanero 3y ago
How can chrome be broken off from the rest of google? It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox and Safari do (bid out the default search engine).
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    So now you have the Chrome team with an even more direct incentive to maximize search volumes at the expense of a good product since that's their revenue source too.
    - to11mtm 3y ago
      That would be a good thing if it drove people away... After the WEI incident chrome is pretty dang tainted to me. I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone...
      - warkdarrior 3y ago
        > I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone... I do not know this story. How did the Chromium team force Opera to change rendering engines?
        lightspot21 3y ago
        The same way Microsoft was forced to change to Chromium for Edge - Google forcing Chromium-specific features through the standardization process at a rate exhausting for Microsoft (or any other browser engine implementor) to follow in time without popular sites breaking.

nonethewiser 3y ago

The strategy to appease by finding additional revenue sources seems flawed. Regardless of these additional revenue sources, you're still leaving money on the table by not rolling back. Ideally you roll back and add the additional revenue sources. To be clear, they shouldn't roll back. Because it's shitty. But that's the reason - "It's shitty" - not "we can add additional revenue sources elsewhere too." If you validate ads team's concern for revenue but then dont maximize revenue then you should expect them to be dissatisfied.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Detecting sarcasm online these days is nearly impossible.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  nice rescue hah
lozenge 3y ago
Anil did address that in the earliest message (page 5)
whimsicalism 3y ago
It makes sense if there is a threshold for wall street expectations in what is a hit vs a miss

hfjjbf 3y ago

[dead]

mistercheph 3y ago

I'm assuming this related to the omnibox auto-searching alternative providers with default keywords or broadcasting that a user can hit tab to search (e.g. typing wikipedia or youtube in omnibox)

jiveturkey 3y ago

Did they roll back the change? We can argue about pressure all we want. enshittification is a thing, regardless of monopoly.

nojito 3y ago
They made google search the default instead of your previous webpage visits.

generationP 3y ago

Could it have been what led to this? https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/6240767/behaviour-of-the-omnibox-changed-how-to-change-back?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/6240767/behaviour-o...

qingcharles 3y ago
It sounds like that might be it. I love this. Sales are being whiny bitches because one part of the company improved a product to make it more customer-friendly and their short-term revenue decreased. Without them even once addressing the fact that improving Chrome as a browser will ultimately increase their market share and search volume. It's great to see how shitty decisions are made inside big corps.
- lazide 3y ago
  Increased market share is a plus for another department that may or may not eventually occur. Major hits to revenue/metrics for ads right now would be clearly documented and immediately material.

quickthrower2 3y ago

What a soul destroying job. One way to make the revenue up is just show Google results when someone types in another URL like https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/. Why not? Makes more SQVs. Oops we thought you wanted to search for that URL!

Waterluvian 3y ago

> sales is going to miss quota This is why I can’t take sales, as an organization, seriously. I mean, I get it. I get how and why. Capitalism. Stock prices. Salaries. But there’s such an inhumanity to deciding upon some number and then making decisions based on that number even if they’re dumb. Decisionmaking reduced to “I’m going miss quota!” I guess this is their own story point hell.

lazide 3y ago
And you’ve never winced when releasing a feature to hit a date because you knew the tests weren’t solid? It’s the same thing, except their risks and rewards are very concrete and easy to model.
pcurve 3y ago
As someone who failed at sales, I have nothing but respect for people in sales, and people who work in account management that put up with client bull shit and bring home the bacon.

throwaway2037 3y ago

I'm confused by the sentiment of the discussion here. There is so much talk about monopoly. Yes, Chrome has a commanding market lead, but it is not a monopoly in the eyes of US competition law (EU may be different; I am less familiar). It is more like an oligopoly. Mozilla Firefox is a very good alternative; so is Opera; so is Microsoft Edge; so is Apple Safari; so is Brave. Does anyone know if "Jerry's" change to the Omnibox also applied to Chromium? If yes, then this monopoly argument is even weaker. If Google decides to rollback the change, then derivatives of Chromium (Opera, Edge, etc.) can simply re-apply the change into their own fork. I think all this monopoly talk is almost impossible to win any court case because there is real competition and the core is open source. Does anyone know if there have been any substantial legal victories against any software oligopolies where the software is substantially open source and the closed source version is free? I cannot think of any.

ttt3ts 3y ago
It isn't about the browser. It is about search and ads which are not free or open source. There are alternatives but Google's market share is ~92% which is similar level to ie when Microsoft faced it's anti trust case. They pay off mozzila & apple to be default search. Bing has 7% market share and they are the only "real" competition. The browser is just one more way google maintains it's core search business. E.g. their recently released topics api
- yunwal 3y ago
  The claim is that Google is using their dominance in browsers to unfairly drive business to their search/ads product. Yes, google has more market dominance in search but that’s not the reason for the lawsuit.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

Thank you for an entirely different reason. Infinite captcha loop and can't use the archive.ph link.

GoatOfAplomb 3y ago

Also - I don't recognize Jerry, but I do recognize many of the other names on the threads, and they're VPs or SVPs. So there's no argument of "this is just some random Googlers talking before their bosses got involved". These are the bosses. Edit: Jerry is also a VP, per LinkedIn.

wnevets 3y ago

Whenever someone askes how "insert site/app" got worse just point them to this, 9 times out of 10 this is probably the reason.

jerryfromsales 3y ago

[flagged]

Justsignedup 3y ago

Eye opening but not surprising. A company who is building a product who's feature is user-friendly and user-focused but hurts the thing that moves the needle forward for the company is going to be met with heavy resistance. Its like a car company in which the design team makes a design so reliable it'll cut revenue in half due to not selling parts, it can't happen.