The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

When A Big Customer Leaves, Defend The Ones Who Stayed

When a defector proves your platform isn't the only option, your first job is to make staying feel obviously worth it.

Short term, we put in motion a surge plan to throw extra love/promotion to top developers and games (including Tencent portfolio companies). We want these folks to have a very strong Q3... particularly if and when comparisons start being drawn to off-Play performance. We are also on heightened alert and engaging early with other top devs bringing PC franchises to mobile (Tencent, Blizzard & Netease, to name a few). Longer term, the team is working on a proposal for a more formalized cross-Google package of benefits and services for game developers. The Epic/BC exercise was instructive in showing what we could potentially put together across Cloud/YT/Ads if we were focused on this across the company. Even at smaller scale, this is something we need to do and plan for in our P&L going forward. Related to the Phone Weekly point, I briefed Sameer on the Leads discussion regarding sideloading and the desire to look at the evolution of that feature and the longer-term security model on the platform. I suspect we'll want to dig into that in the coming weeks as well.

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Court Exhibit
In re Google Play Store Antitrust Litigation (Epic v. Google)
3:21-md-02981 (CAND), Doc. 886-65, filed 2023-12-21
August 8, 2018
Public domain
View the primary source →