I agree on the general point. Corporate culture and the meaningless ways of talking that go with it are both (a) extremely dominant part of overall culture and (b) extremely disengenious and repressed. We talk like this a lot, among colleagues, to customers, politicians talk this way.
I'm not sure what's going on here though. It definitely isn't "some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites." It's probably more to do with the fact that Google images is designed for viewing images, not finding links and that kind of makes it a content scraping site.
The idea that Google (or anyone) would speak normally (like a googler would speak, in a cafe) is oddly insane.
"After years of complaints and some lawsuits, we've decided to bite the bullet and take away the damned view image button. People use google images by searching for a thing and looking at the pictures. They don't really visit the website because well... they're looking for pictures not some random website that happens to have a picture. That means this isn't really a websearch site. It's pinterest with stolen content. Basically, Google images is kind of ilegal, but still dead useful. Hopefully this change will get the most litiguous photographers off our case and it'll be more or less business as usual."
I guess in this case speaking plainly actually does have nasty legal implications, but we do corporate speak regardless.
When OKCupid killed their app by making it a poorly implemented tinder clone with vestigial features, they pretended they had just discovered new and exciting things about first names, swiping and such.
Would it have really harmed them to say, real names are more normal now. Tinder is eating our lunch. Our average user keeps getting older. Our UI isn't as good for mobile or whatever reasons really drove those decisions. I'd be more interested in reading it then.
At the very least, ommit the meaningless stuff. Just say we're taking away this button and don't give a reason.
It would feel incredibly odd to lie like this between unincorporated natural persons in a noncommercial setting. Can you imagine telling your friends you'll noshow a bbq with some corproate-speak nonsense?.
It is not non-sense or meaningless though, and thinking that is dangerous. It is corporate propaganda and it is outrageously effective at shaping thought both internally and externally (internally being, perhaps, the most important portion). Linguistically speaking, the language we use has a material impact on how we think about the underlying ideas.
I'm not sure what's going on here though. It definitely isn't "some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites." It's probably more to do with the fact that Google images is designed for viewing images, not finding links and that kind of makes it a content scraping site.
The idea that Google (or anyone) would speak normally (like a googler would speak, in a cafe) is oddly insane.
"After years of complaints and some lawsuits, we've decided to bite the bullet and take away the damned view image button. People use google images by searching for a thing and looking at the pictures. They don't really visit the website because well... they're looking for pictures not some random website that happens to have a picture. That means this isn't really a websearch site. It's pinterest with stolen content. Basically, Google images is kind of ilegal, but still dead useful. Hopefully this change will get the most litiguous photographers off our case and it'll be more or less business as usual."
I guess in this case speaking plainly actually does have nasty legal implications, but we do corporate speak regardless.
When OKCupid killed their app by making it a poorly implemented tinder clone with vestigial features, they pretended they had just discovered new and exciting things about first names, swiping and such.
Would it have really harmed them to say, real names are more normal now. Tinder is eating our lunch. Our average user keeps getting older. Our UI isn't as good for mobile or whatever reasons really drove those decisions. I'd be more interested in reading it then.
At the very least, ommit the meaningless stuff. Just say we're taking away this button and don't give a reason.
It would feel incredibly odd to lie like this between unincorporated natural persons in a noncommercial setting. Can you imagine telling your friends you'll noshow a bbq with some corproate-speak nonsense?.