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The specific process by which Google enshittified its search (24 Apr 2024)
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:
Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.
Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.
Companies choose not to enshittify their products...until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.
The Men Who Killed Google Search
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google's head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a "code yellow" for search revenue due to, and I quote, "steady weakness in the daily numbers" and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
For those unfamiliar with Google's internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A "code yellow" isn't, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy's tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I'm not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It's essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.
In emails released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was "significantly behind forecast," the "timing" of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that "several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses" existed in search.
Anyway, a few days beforehand on February 1 2019, Kristen Gil, then Google's VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google's VP of Engineering, Search and Discover, saying that the ads team had been considering a "code yellow" to "close the search gap [it was] seeing," vaguely referring to how critical that growth was to an unnamed "company plan." To be clear, this email was in response to Thakur stating that there is "nothing" that the search team could do to operate at the fidelity of growth that ads had demanded.
Shashi forwarded the email to Gomes, asking if there was any way to discuss this with Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, and declaring that there was no way he'd sign up to a "high fidelity" business metric for daily active users on search. Thakur also said something that I've been thinking about constantly since I read these emails: that there was a good reason that Google's founders separated search from ads.
On February 2, 2019, just one day later, Thakur and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox, a Vice President of Search and Google Assistant, entering a multiple-day-long debate about Google's sudden lust for growth. The thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thakur listed the multiple points of disconnection between the ads and search teams, discussing how the search team wasn't able to finely optimize engagement on Google without "hacking engagement," a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to "abandon work on efficient journeys." In one email, Fox adds that there was a "pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads want" and what search was doing.
When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was "the revenue engine of the company," and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially "the new reality of their jobs."
On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was "getting too close to the money," and ended his email by saying that he was "concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about."
[Ed's Comment: This is only the beginning of the story. Go to the link if you wish to read more.--JR]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Saturday April 27 2024, @06:40AM (7 children)
That horse has bolted in the 70'ies, when the currency was floated. If the absolute level of wealth has suddenly lost its value, what do you replace it with? With the accumulation rate, of course, thus "wealth" nowadays is measured in "growth" units (simple, just switch the function value with its first derivative).
FTFY.
Your definition of "not being a failure" is good for a family business. Or for a coop, like the Mondragon corp (ye know? The social-democracy you're so quick to berate as ebil). Yet, the same definition is death for a public company that seeks money on the stock market, competing with others that need capital and are showing a higher rate of growth.
Why do you hate capitalism? :large-grin:
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Interesting) by weirsbaski on Saturday April 27 2024, @07:23AM (6 children)
The "stock market" isn't some magical creature that lives and breathes on its own, it's the encapsulation of buying and selling stocks and securities, and its behavior is the result of decisions made by the people who agree on buy/sell prices.
It's perfectly reasonable for GP to call out MBAs, as they're well-overrepresented in the group of decision-makers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday April 27 2024, @09:13AM (4 children)
The majority of those people are stock traders, who are interested in having a slice of the ... you guessed it, growth.
Long gone are the times when the majority of stock owners where mainly interested in the dividend.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Saturday April 27 2024, @10:24AM (3 children)
That's only because companies are allowed to artificially raise their share prices by buying shares back or buying up their competitors. They could just as easily just issue dividends for whatever money was left over after expenses and company investments are made. A company can issue small dividends indefinitely without needing to grow much.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday April 27 2024, @10:04PM (2 children)
That's what the investors ask for, growth. And they will reward the ones that deliver. To the point in which the publicly traded companies that prefer steady are weaker financially and fall prey to the so-rewarded competition.
If you have your retirement in a pension fund (which is the wise thing to do), you yourself are asking for growth. Because otherwise the currency floating (and the switch to growth as the societal value) will eat away your static retirement savings and you will 100% need to run-just-to-stay-in-place and keep working, until you die.
Mind you, even if you "ask for growth", there's no warranty your pension will be enough for your (economically) inactive phase of your life after retirement, but its guaranteed that if you don't ask for growth, you will die a destitute.
Without growth, you can't have the fast technological progress and improvement in the quality of life that we saw in the last 100-150 years. But, you know, TANSTAAFL. Very likely, we (as the humanity) will need to learn the ways of sustainable growth, but we can't refuse growth.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday April 28 2024, @11:41AM (1 child)
Which should happen just by keeping up with inflation. No need to do anything crazy as prices go up with inflation as does the price of other things and as long as your customers can keep paying for it, you're not in any danger from that.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday April 28 2024, @12:18PM
And exactly how do you propose to make this happen?
Like, who establishes what's the optimum level of inflation (thus how much money are fiat into existence) and who enforces the "no growth greater than the inflation rate" rule?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Friday May 03 2024, @02:02AM
But the market is composed of millions of investors, and if the CEO doesn't pursue maximum growth then the board of directors will replace the CEO. And if the board of directors doesn't pursue maximum growth then the shareholders will replace the board of directors. And you might convince 1 investor, or 10, or 10,000 not to do that. But you can't talk the whole market into sanity.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc... and all of the evil crap they're doing aren't doing it because of a handful of assholes in key positions. Their evil is a symptom, the whole fucking market is the disease.