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Note: This Wednesday Wisdom is the article version of a talk I gave at Google Zürich in November 2024. If you are inside Google, you should be able to find the video. It is a bit of a lengthy exposé, so for easy digestion it has been cut in two halves. This week: Part one on external pressures.
I have been in the fortunate circumstance to have worked at companies of all t-shirt sizes: XS to XL and everything in between. In some cases, I was at these companies long enough that I could witness their expanding girth first-hand. People in large companies often complain about the changes that come with size and these complaints are often justified: There is usually a lot more bureaucracy than there used to be, internal policies grow stupider over time, and velocity keeps on dropping. Seen from the perspective of the early employees, all of these changes are outright terrible.
I am afraid though that, awful as these changes might be, they are inevitable. As companies grow, they have to change; they cannot not change. Sometimes it happens faster, sometimes it takes more time, but it will happen. I hate to pierce your bubble (actually, I don’t), but you might run away from WhatsApp to Signal or from Twitter to BlueSky, but if these companies are going to be successful, they too will not be able to escape corporate gravity…
Everyone loves kids…
When tech companies kick-off and start offering new and cool services, everyone loves them. They are new, they are hip, and they either do things that have never been done before or do them so much better that they are considered game changers. Of course everyone loves them: There is nothing happening yet that is not to love.
For instance, when Google started out, people were in love with the company and its products. Suddenly, you could just enter a few key words and get a great list of relevant web pages. Amazingly, you could enter an address and get an accurate map and good driving directions to boot. It was good, it was fast, it was convenient, and it was cheap (namely free). The ads weren’t annoying yet and Google wasn’t yet hovering up reams of personal data in order to profile its users into ever finer-grained categories of ad targets. When Google Earth was released, the entire planet lost a day of useful work as everyone looked up their house, their school, and the area where they grew up. When GMail was released, everyone I knew was blown away by the amount of free storage available, and it suddenly became obvious that you would never have to delete an email ever again and that very photo you ever took was now kept forever.
Similar stories can be written about Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and Amazon. All went through a phase of being public darlings as they revolutionized their chosen areas of operation. Suddenly, you could call a car using an app without fear of being fleeced by a cab driver who did not even know where you wanted to go. Suddenly, you could get every book (and later: every thing) delivered to your doorstep, even if you lived in rural Pennsyltucky. Suddenly, you could effortlessly stay in touch with people that lived far away or that you otherwise did not run into on a regular basis. These services changed society in a profound way and we all thought these changes were for the better.
I still think most of these changes are for the better. By now we know that there are also downsides to everyone being able to post every fleeting thought and making that thought findable, pushable, and monetizable. However, I remember the 1970s and 1980s quite clearly and, believe me, they were not some golden age of consensus and rationality.
People usually like kids more than they like grown-ups: Whenever a kid does something, it is always cute, even when it's annoying. When big tech was young, they were essentially still kids and therefore public darlings and people loved them for all the wonderful things they did. On top of that, these companies were great employers, offering great salaries, great benefits, and sporting amazing offices. The media, always ready to report incessantly and stupidly about the new thing, couldn’t get enough of it.
And what was there not to like? Ads weren't very annoying yet, privacy problems didn’t exist yet, tech nerds weren’t pricing normal people out of San Francisco yet, and these companies weren’t yet laying off people while making record profits. But, I am running ahead of myself a bit.
The times, they are a-changin… 🎶🎵🎶
Pilots know that everything that goes up must come down and so eventually in the life of every new company there occurs some event that exposes its darker side. For Google, I think it started with Street View: Suddenly people could see photos of their house on Google Maps and they thought: “Hey, hang on, Google drove cars through my street, took photos of my house, and these are now on the Internet for everyone to see? That’s not cool!” It was a clear example of the lesson that quantity has its own quality: It might have been remotely possible before to drive cars through every road in the world, take photos, and publish them, but technology had made that relatively easy. Street View caused a privacy outrage, especially in Europe.
One of the reasons that Europe is more privacy-aware than other parts of the world is the memory of World War II where the Nazis had shown how to use immaculate government records to find all the people they wanted to kill. In Holland, the 1971 census was canceled because of fears that the computer would make a future mass deportation and holocaust even easier to execute. Since then we all gave the government our fingerprints in order to get a passport and the Dutch government instituted an idiotic law forcing everyone over 15 to carry an id, but still…
For Facebook the seminal event was probably the Cambridge Analytica scandal which brought to light that Meta really knew an awful lot about everyone and was not above selling that data to the highest bidder for whatever purpose, be it selling crappy pet toys, influencing local elections, or facilitating genocide. Uber found themselves in the news in a number of bad ways and so did Amazon. And probably the less that’s said about Twitter, the better it is.
Google probably found themselves in the hottest waters though. On top of Street View, they got themselves in trouble for copyright infringement with Google Books and of course it came out that they had been collecting WiFi signals including clear text packets (potentially containing sensitive data) using their Street View cars.
Google always claimed that this was due to a bug in their code which was supposed to only snoop SSIDs and MAC addresses of WiFi routers. I worked at Google when this happened and from what I know this is most likely true, but really, what do I know…
Intermezzo: A little bit of science…
Way back when, I took some psychology classes in university and one of the things they explained to us was the “S-O-R” diagram: Stimulus → Organism → Response. The thought behind this very simple model is that somebody or something reacts to events from their environment and that this drives changes in their behavior. We are all connected in a network of these reactions and one organism's response is another organism's stimulus and so forth.
The reason I am throwing that in here is that you should view the changes in companies as a result of changes in their stimuli. These changes make these companies change their behaviors and that results in triggering other actors in society, who then change their behavior too, triggering the companies again, and so forth. Given that we are known to react predictably (rationally or irrationally) to things, my thesis is that the changes that these chains of reactions bring about are inevitable.
Court cases start happening…
Larger companies find themselves almost continuously in court. There are patent claims from competitors, class-action suits from disgruntled customers egged on by greedy law firms, and regulatory actions by various government agencies. For instance, Google was taken to court by various governments over Street View and by book publishers and authors over their relentless scanning of copyrighted books. Facebook found themselves in a wide variety of court rooms over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and of course over anti-competitive behavior. Uber, Twitter, Amazon, each and every one of them started getting involved in a lot of litigation. This got so out of hand that I started joking that after software engineers, lawyers were probably the biggest professional group in tech.
The need for message discipline
The problem with lawsuits is that their outcomes often depend on you making your strongest arguments very credibly in the court of public opinion and in a court of law. This means that you need a clear communication strategy and that drives a need for a super tight message discipline, because few things do more damage to your case than a newspaper article or a public post where you or one of your employees concedes some point or spills some dirt which wrecks your carefully constructed narrative. It is for that reason that lawyers always tell their customers to shut the f*ck up and not talk to anyone, ever.
As companies grow, that message discipline gets harder and harder to enforce, which is sad because you need more and more of it! When you are just a merry band of nerds, it usually works just fine to ask all of your employees to keep their mouths shut in public, but as your employee base grows, that stops working. I remember that when Google was working on the Chrome browser, we all knew about it but nobody spilled the beans, so when we released it, it was (mostly) a complete surprise. Only one or two years later, some of my more idiotic colleagues started live tweeting from our weekly Q&A with the executives and this started the practice of no longer telling us anything meaningful ahead of time. Instead, the company sent us an email with a copy of a press release five minutes before it was sent to Reuters and the Associated Press (of “Gulf of Mexico” fame). The weekly Q&A also became stage-managed to absurdity, carefully scripting every line, thereby turning the regular line-up of rambling but fully authentic engineers telling us about their projects into the worst amateur acting I have ever witnessed this side of the compulsory grade six musical (I was the lead in mine).
This change is inevitable: As you are older and grow larger, it gets harder to keep your employees in line because they have a more tenuous relationship to the company (more on this in part two). The company must respond to this by becoming more tight-lipped and really not sharing anything of material interest with everyone because the group as a whole cannot be trusted to keep stuff secret: People want to impress journalists with their “insider knowledge”, hold grudges against their manager and want to “stick it to the man’, or are just careless.
Preemptive defenses against lawsuits lead to changes in internal communication style and policy because you must make sure that nobody writes something that can be unearthed in a future legal discovery and then put in context to mean exactly what you thought at the time but really don’t want anyone to know that you did. So no more “burying competitors” or “killing their product” please! In this phase, comms and legal also make everyone go through a “Communicating with care” computer-based training, leading to a measurable reduction of everyone’s will to live. It is also not uncommon for retention limits to be placed on emails and chats, ensuring that nobody can figure out anymore what happened more than five years ago.
Public opinion changes…
As a result of all of this, public opinion starts shifting. No longer a public darling, the company now has “haters”. I remember this happening for Google in 2009-2010 when instead of proudly telling people I worked for the company, I started being a bit quieter about it, lest I get negative feedback that I could easily deal with but didn’t always want to have to deal with.
Once, during a campus recruiting event, one of the things that was yelled at me during the Q&A after my talk on the riveting topic of our Global File System, was that “Google reads all your email!” “We do,” I responded: “I read your email this morning and I must say it was not very interesting…”
This shift in public opinion prompts more communication strategy and more messaging discipline. Suddenly the company needs PR and comms “specialists” and that typically leads to the world’s dumbest PR campaigns because these “experts” seem to only be able to spend millions on lifeless Superbowl ads or come up with campaigns that target the lowest common denominator in the audience’s understanding and interest, thereby ensuring that they influence approximately nobody.
I think Google suffered more than most from the public’s shift in perspective because of its widely touted slogan: “Don’t be evil.” Let’s start by recognizing how incredibly ambitious this motto is. It’s not enough to just not do evil things, Google promised that they weren’t even thinking evil thoughts. That’s very Old Testament, on par with Exodus 20:17 which says that you must not covet your neighbor’s wife. Apparently it’s not enough to promise not to engage in extramarital night exercise, the mere thinking about it is enough to deny you ever-lasting life.
Personally I always found this a very high bar and I hereby officially announce that I do not bear a grudge against anyone for the simple act of just coveting the very lovely and beautiful Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom…
People told Google: “You said you weren’t evil! But now you are doing evil things! What’s up with that?” As I see it, Microsoft and Amazon had a much easier time of it because nobody was ever in any doubt that Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos were hard-nosed-take-no-prisoners business people and so we were not surprised that they were evil and we didn’t mind as long as they kept delivering the goods.
S-O-R again…
All of these shifts and changes are stimuli that caused these companies, the public-at-large, and governments to respond to each other. As the companies were no longer the new kids on the block and started doing things that were no longer necessarily seen as an unquestionable good, governments started investigating them and pressure groups filed lawsuits. The companies responded by tightening their messaging which made them seem evasive and less transparent, stoking fears that they did have something to hide (they did; everyone does). Eventually, governments started thinking about regulation, which these companies opposed and lobbied against. This caused them to be viewed as overtly political actors that were mostly in the game for themselves. This then changed the external perception some more, to which companies responded with soulless “feel good” campaigns, showing how small business people used the company to connect to customers or how small coffee farmers rely on Whatsapp (they do, that’s not in dispute).
This cycle of events is inevitable unless companies stay small and never reach the point that they own their space and become quasi-monopolies, but that is not the way of things in a network economy, where the natural trend is to either dominate your space or go extinct. In our winner takes most world, you have to grow and expand, which means that you will run into boundaries in society, which means that you will cause reactions in the form of regulation and lawsuits, which means that you must enforce message discipline, which requires you to become less transparent to your own employees, which by the way are different from the first batch and leakier buckets at that.
This concludes part one of “Nobody escapes corporate gravity”. The conclusion, which will be published next week, will focus on company changes that are caused by the employee base growing and changing. I promise that it will be much juicier than this episode, so if you haven’t subscribed to Wednesday Wisdom yet, do so today so that you won’t miss it!
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