So, what’s in the document that Google didn’t want to get out?
The document in question contains meeting notes that Google’s vice president for finance, Michael Roszak, “created for a course on communications,” Bloomberg reported. In his notes, Roszak wrote that Google’s search advertising “is one of the world’s greatest business models ever created” with economics that only certain “illicit businesses” selling “cigarettes or drugs” “could rival.”
[…]Beyond likening Google’s search advertising business to illicit drug markets, Roszak’s notes also said that because users got hooked on Google’s search engine, Google was able to “mostly ignore the demand side” of “fundamental laws of economics” and “only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales.” This was likely the bit that actually interested the DOJ.
“We could essentially tear the economics textbook in half,” Roszak’s notes said.
Juicy documents from an abusive monopolist are always a fun read.
And… we here see the worldview divide between the engineers and executives.
From the engineer point of view, users always came first. I remember pushing changes that *reduced* engagement (“unhooking” people if we were to follow the same language) in order to increase quality.
Anyway, I am not privy to details of these communications, nor I can comment on what has happened based on them (i.e.: if these were acted upon or not).
sukru,
To have such explicit quotes coming from executives is quite telling. I suspect a lot of google engineers personally dislike invasive products, user tracking and artificial dependencies. It’s the higher ups ordering them to engineer things to give google more data & control over owners. And the yes-men who do this best will be promoted into the executive ranks.
It’s ancient history at this point, but the emails uncovered in microsoft’s antitrust lawsuits were eye opening as well. Behind closed doors Microsoft were very deliberately in their actions and used their monopoly to make sure competing businesses would not be viable. Unfortunately this is the way dominant companies think: making products and services is only part of the job, the other part is keeping competitors out of the market.
Alfman,
Can’t speak for the current state, but in the past engineers had visibility and courage to push back against these kind of requests (successfully). The problem is, there seems to be a correlation between being “ruthless” and as you said climbing up the ladder (but usually transplanting from other companies as a high level manager, bringing along the culture).
I have seen it happen to a friend’s company. He was more or less the only person technically capable on this team, causing his manager and lead to team up against my friend, writing low performance reviews (which were later corrected by HR, and so on). After a while, they managed to get rid of him in a layoff (could not fire), but then the entire company itself has significant financial troubles due to mismanagement.
I hope Google does not move into that direction, but finds the way (again).