I'd doubt there was even that much involvement from the other companies - more along the lines of "We'd like to involve the following quote from your boss as a third-party validator in our release. OK?" And then their corporate PR says OK, because they haven't see the other ones, and it goes in the package.
This is how large-scale communications works - you write your message, come up with quotes that support your message, get them OK'ed by stakeholders, and send them out. If you ever see a media release that doesn't come from a speech, and it includes quotes from anyone, you can bet they never actually said those things - someone from PR wrote them, and got them OKed to have been considered said.
Put it another way, the first time the CEOs quoted ever saw what they "said" was probably when they read this page
That’s certainly also possible. I was just thinking there was more involvement because I have a really hard time imagining that some PR person at Google was writing one statement after another and didn’t notice how odd they would sound if you put them together on a page. Noticing stuff like that is something PR people are supposed to be good at.
That’s why I was thinking that Google gave them some talking points and they got oddly similar sounding statements back and didn’t really bother changing them afterwards.
This is how large-scale communications works - you write your message, come up with quotes that support your message, get them OK'ed by stakeholders, and send them out. If you ever see a media release that doesn't come from a speech, and it includes quotes from anyone, you can bet they never actually said those things - someone from PR wrote them, and got them OKed to have been considered said.
Put it another way, the first time the CEOs quoted ever saw what they "said" was probably when they read this page