So that was a lie
This call was followed by a contentious Q&A where the Stadia boss was confronted about his email from just the week before which suggested anything but a wholesale shutdown of the studios. Harrison expressed his regret over the misleading statements made in his previous email, according to four sources with knowledge of the call. When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.”
https://kotaku.com/stadia-leadership-praised-development-stu...
But with team dynamics getting thrown in I think that narrative sounds noble and glamorous but has little to nothing to do with reality. Instead it's an equal part "I can save this" and "we aren't gonna save this but we need people to stay to help with an orderly shutdown", and the Mushroom Treatment (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit).
That is a clear violation of informed consent. Even if it might lead to better short-term outcomes, over the long-term it leads to degrading trust in doctors. Same with this case. It gives all of us (internal employees, outside devs, businesses, customers) even more reasons to never believe any promise that comes out of the mouth of an Alphabet executive.
What you shouldn’t do is enumerate all of the potential side effects in vivid detail. That’s the WebMD curse. But if someone wants you to look at your work you should look at your work, not blow them off on the phone. That’s just more arrogant asshole behavior, which contributes to White Coat Syndrome.
What are we going to call WCS for mega corps with short attention spans? Because I think we need one.
In their circles it’s called “controlling the message”, “not causing panic”, “simplifying” etc. They often simply do not believe it’s lying
You shouldn't. At best, they are fellow travelers. At worst, they aren't accountable to you, and their incentive structure usually does not drive them to behave ethically towards you.
Execs aren't paid to lead, they are paid to deliver business value. Ethical leadership is often incidental or counterproductive to it.
In this case, the execs were paid to do everything possible to promote and grow the product. And that's what they did.
"Working as Intended"
I thought it was fairly rude and also I thought the execs were simply using careful language. After attending a bunch more TGIFs, I finally realized that nearly every exec had a very specific way of presenting things that sort of made their work sound perfect, even if it was shit. You can see an example in "An Update On Google Reader" or "Advancing our Amazing Bet on Google Fiber", or even this one.
Source: https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1574790973443522566
If you read between the lines, those kind of announcements can usually be a good indicator of the appropriate “time to adapt”, whether that be to prepare for a layoff or to start buying IP on a survivable platform.
The sooner you learn this, the more information you can get from this sort of release. It doesn't mean you can perfectly decode it, it just means you can get more information. And the amount of time that "more information" outright contradicts the nominal content of the statement... it's not terribly uncommon. It's certainly the normal case that the decoded content heavily shades the nominal content.
Of course asking people teaching "critical thinking" to arm the students with a toolset that can be turned against the teachers is a pretty tall ask. I've had teachers who could take that level of heat, and props to them, but I've certainly had teachers that simply couldn't.
More broadly, this applies to any hierarchical authority system. The amount of agitprop is proportional to the number of levels between you and the person speaking, and the amount of truthful and not misleading information is inversely proportional.
The corpo doth protest too much. If they have to say it, it has to be a lie.
From what I saw, the Stadia team was working hard on product improvements and adding new games still. So a careful parsing of the sentence is that the Stadia team was still working towards the goals of expanding the service, as the shutdown decision wasn't made yet or told to the team yet.
It got out that one of my favorite restaurants was going to lose their lease for new construction, and didn't have plans to relocate. I moved shortly thereafter and never checked up on them. What actually happened is that the construction project got delayed over a year, and the restaurant stayed, but anyone who didn't live in the immediate vicinity didn't hear about that. Any time I told someone it was still open, the response was happy, but complete surprise.
They opened a kind of a cafe with just a fraction of their menu closer to my house, but the location wasn't great (It's worth paying someone to sit around a potential location for hours on multiple days to see what foot traffic is like. If you're across a high traffic street from a high foot traffic area that doesn't mean you'll see foot traffic) and I'm sure by then the rumor of their demise had affected revenue. So bad location and the food wasn't quite as good as at the old location. Probably staff turnover.
That slow avalanche took three years to shutter the company, and they probably would have been fine if they'd managed to stay out of the local paper.
Being caught saying “don’t worry” just damages their brand more. What they really need is to declare some things as sacred cows. But you can’t do that after you’ve already lied using the same phrasing.
It does sound like they're trying to do better, but it was a long time coming and this still isn't good behavior.
The exec communication with the devs is unfortunate, but a separate matter.
I encourage you to consider looking for work at a company which respects you; you’re worth it.
But there's a corporate twist here, in that the person saying might have believed it to be true, because some executive also believed it to be true, even though if you take Google as a whole, it was always uncertain.
So I think I'd call this "corporate bullshit", where Google as an entity has low regard for the truth as presented by PR mouthpieces, and is thus a dedicated bullshitter.
What service is better than Stadia at actually running games in the cloud?
Anyone who didn't think Stadia was going to shut down at least a year ago was either kind of inexperienced or being paid not to realize the obvious.
If they can't find peace with everybody calling them a professional liar, they should quit their job and find an honest line of work.
Blatant lies are destroying nations.