Google antitrust trial

Jump to latest Follow Reply
H

Horatio

Ars Legatus Legionis
24,069
Moderator
  • #41
    Not a super-expert here, but basically, the court put people under a litigation hold. If documents are destroyed while under a litigation hold, the judge or jury can be allowed to draw adverse inference, i.e. assume that what was destroyed said something bad for the destroying party.
    wco81 said:
    In tech, people often will not discuss certain things in writing -- no emails, no chats, not even leaving voice mails.
    Click to expand...
    I'm not sure what you mean by "tech", but this is not true in my (FAANG, FAANG-adjacent, other large tech company) experience. Everything is written down. Our primary mode of communication is either chat, post, email, or documents. Anything that matters will have a long-lasting record. Now, that record may be marked "A/C Priv", but we have rules around that so it doesn't get abused (though I've heard Google definitely abuses it). I have seen retention policies some places, which say "we autodelete stuff after 3 years" or something, but any litigation involving that individual, even tangentially will trigger a full litigation hold, and nothing will be deleted for that person until the hold expires.
     
    Last edited:
    W

    wco81

    Ars Legatus Legionis
    28,661
  • #43
    I'm not even talking about large issues, where someone might raise concerns about antitrust matters.

    Just in everyday business, when some sensitive topics are broached, some people will just stop responding in email chains and the only way to continue is verbally.

    It's not that people are conscious that some written communications may be used in some future litigation so much as something written may be used against them for personnel reasons, things like reviews, causes for termination, etc.

    There are certainly a lot of water cooler discussions about larger industry issues. But they don't even do that in the office. They will walk outside if it's a nice day, even off campus.
     
    • Like
    Reactions: m0nckywrench
    H

    Horatio

    Ars Legatus Legionis
    24,069
    Moderator
  • #44
    wco81 said:
    Just in everyday business, when some sensitive topics are broached, some people will just stop responding in email chains and the only way to continue is verbally.
    Click to expand...
    Sure, people take discussions offline or into meetings, but all even trivially important decisions have a written form. We get training for this.

    Maybe your company, or this unnamed company or companies you're referencing don't, but they are playing with fire. Do you have actual first hand experience of this happening?
     
    H

    Horatio

    Ars Legatus Legionis
    24,069
    Moderator
  • #46
    wco81 said:
    Yes, I'd rather not mention former employers but I'm not making this behavior up.

    And you are also trying to get people to commit to things in writing and there are times they won't, just tell you in person.
    Click to expand...
    Ok but when you action those things, there's no written record? And there's no training about how to record things? That's how people's personal phones and computers get subpoenaed.
     
    H

    Horatio

    Ars Legatus Legionis
    24,069
    Moderator
  • #48
    wco81 said:
    Well we were aware of the MS case but it's not like we thought the things we were doing might run afoul of any kind of laws.

    I do remember some discussion and processes around Sarbanes Oxley compliance but that was a long time ago, long before I stopped working for these employers.
    Click to expand...
    Heh, I wasn't even thinking about SOX compliance, I was thinking about basic information hygene. If you get sued (by anyone, not just the government) and it's revealed you have a policy of doing things without an official record, that's 1/going to look shady to a jury 2/ going to get your employee's personal devices subpoenaed and imaged in discovery. At my company and all of the others I've worked at, letting good records and using A/C priv correctly are part of mandatory compliance training. Recently they've added "never use disappearing messaging for any business purpose".
     
    • Like
    Reactions: m0nckywrench
    E

    Echohead2

    Ars Legatus Legionis
    60,035
  • #49
    Horatio said:
    Would they though (presuming the deal continues)? Google isn't going to stay still and just be doing web search while LLMs take over. For Apple to take control back over the search box would mean giving up the Google payment which means it would need to deliver ~$30B/yr in value. I don't think they could half ass that.

    Imagine this crazy hypothetical:
    Microsoft just straight gives Bing to Apple (including a reasonable interpretation of the OpenAI relationship) and will cover all reasonable capex and opex for say 5 years. But Apple has to stop taking Google's payment - they can keep google as default or do whatever they want. Should Apple take the deal?

    I'd argue no. Apple could not extract enough value from the deal.

    Crazier hypothetical - same thing except Apple gets a straight clone of Google search including the index and software so the search quality would be just as good for user and Apple could do great marketing about privacy. Should Apple take the deal?

    Probably still no. The revenue hit is just too much.

    Now run the numbers without Google being able to pay for being default. Even the half assed in house LLM looks pretty good.
    Click to expand...
    How about this scenario. Google can't pay Apple. MS offers $10b or $20b...does it make sense to take the money from MS and make Bing default?
     
    Y

    YoHo

    Ars Praefectus
    4,319
  • #50
    Horatio said:
    Heh, I wasn't even thinking about SOX compliance, I was thinking about basic information hygene. If you get sued (by anyone, not just the government) and it's revealed you have a policy of doing things without an official record, that's 1/going to look shady to a jury 2/ going to get your employee's personal devices subpoenaed and imaged in discovery. At my company and all of the others I've worked at, letting good records and using A/C priv correctly are part of mandatory compliance training. Recently they've added "never use disappearing messaging for any business purpose".
    Click to expand...
    Yep, This is what normal companies do. Sounds like WCO81 has worked for a rather unscrupulous lot.
     
    W

    wco81

    Ars Legatus Legionis
    28,661
  • #51
    Are you guys honestly saying people only discuss business through written communications?

    We didn't have Slack or these business messaging systems yet.

    We had a lot of meetings -- too many. People would often write down stuff on the whiteboard but not always or not comprehensively.

    Some people would take it upon themselves to quickly write up a summary and distribute notes with action items.

    But there was a lot of one-to-one discussions going on too, not to suppress a written record but some people organically engaged in exchanges, either at each to other's offices, at the cafeteria or on the way to get coffee in the morning or just walking around the campus.

    I wasn't privy to the high-level strategy discussions. So things like shipping schedules or product management, that wasn't something I was looped in on.

    Maybe the discussions that I witnessed just weren't as essential.😊
     
    Y

    YoHo

    Ars Praefectus
    4,319
  • #52
    Meetings had note takers yes. Worst case, people took photographs of the whiteboard so they had the info and could write it up after the fact.

    Sure some people (I'm notriously bad as a note taker) didn't take personal notes, but someone always wrote stuff down.

    I mean sure, if it's a bunch of peers working out the best we to implement some code, or some lab environment and the answer was straightforward, maybe no notes taken...though, that often would burn you when not everyone took away the same thing from the meeting.

    If I had a 1:1 hallway conversation with someone that resulted in some concrete action, then at a bare minimum I wrote down the actions I was responsible for.

    I mean, certainly organizations have gotten far more rigorous on this recently such that tools are implemented to ensure this kind of thing happens. And Slack/Teams and before them onenote helps

    I'm expected to have meaningful items in both workday AND to create tasks in Jira even when they aren't SWDev tasks. If it's not in those places, you didn't do it.

    Things didn't used to be that rigorous, but meetings got notes was kind of the lowest of bars.
     
    E

    Echohead2

    Ars Legatus Legionis
    60,035
  • #53
    YoHo said:
    Meetings had note takers yes. Worst case, people took photographs of the whiteboard so they had the info and could write it up after the fact.

    Sure some people (I'm notriously bad as a note taker) didn't take personal notes, but someone always wrote stuff down.

    I mean sure, if it's a bunch of peers working out the best we to implement some code, or some lab environment and the answer was straightforward, maybe no notes taken...though, that often would burn you when not everyone took away the same thing from the meeting.

    If I had a 1:1 hallway conversation with someone that resulted in some concrete action, then at a bare minimum I wrote down the actions I was responsible for.

    I mean, certainly organizations have gotten far more rigorous on this recently such that tools are implemented to ensure this kind of thing happens. And Slack/Teams and before them onenote helps

    I'm expected to have meaningful items in both workday AND to create tasks in Jira even when they aren't SWDev tasks. If it's not in those places, you didn't do it.

    Things didn't used to be that rigorous, but meetings got notes was kind of the lowest of bars.
    Click to expand...
    I think this varies by industry and the size of the company. I have seen some shady stuff...but if the company is doing under say $20mil/year I don't think most care.
     
    You must log in or register to reply here.
    Jump to latest Follow Reply
    Jump to latest Follow Reply