A Failure to Understand Google and History: First, There Is No Google History for Real Googlers
October 30, 2020
I read “Creative Director At Google Stadia Advocates Streamers Paying Game Devs And Publishers.” The write up explains why game streaming is a good thing. A Googler involved in Stadia, Google’s effort to be a player in the big money world of online escapism, wondered publicly if “Twitch and YouTube users should be “paying the developers and publishers” of the games they stream.”
The write up includes this point:
Meanwhile, I’m just wondering why Hutchinson doesn’t just go read his own employer’s 2013 study that shows just how beneficial let’s plays and game-streaming is for the industry. He might also want to realize that Google’s YouTube has an entire wing of it’s service called YouTube Gaming, built around game-streaming….But it’s probably time to educate Hutchinson on the actual facts that his own employer has made clear in the past.
Observations:
- Googlers are a-historical; that is, there is no history. This is not the Wu thing about the “end of history.” The past is a non-event.
- Googlers making statements illustrate the lack of a cohesive intellectual fabric at the Google. Googlers see the world through a lens crafted by a single Googler or a small group of Googlers clumping.
- Google lawyers, not those working on products, are responsible for figuring out what happened in the past. But those analyses are only germane to legal issues in the here and now.
This article, its reference to a 2013 Google study, and the observation of a single atomic Googler vibrating in bonus space underscore a lack of understanding about the company. The past — like the Googler who died of an alleged overdose on a yacht with an interesting person or the attempted suicide by a jilted friend of a senior Googler — don’t exist. Google invented Google. That’s for sure. However, the silliness of historical events, a record of actions, and the “actual facts” are not germane.
Google is a now outfit. History is for the non-Googleys.
Stephen E Arnold, October 30, 2020
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