The Leadership Letter

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

When a Competitor Bypasses You, Buy Them Back In

The fastest way to defend a platform is to make leaving it more expensive than staying.

Mike, Don, Seeking your guidance on how to secure some quick approvals to negotiate a potentially large deal on short notice with Epic, the developer of Fortnite, related to the launch of its game on Android. Don has the background. Mike, as a bit of context for you, Epic is currently planning to launch Fortnite for Android outside of Play, either directly through its Web site or via an alternate app store (or both). The business and ecosystem implications of this for Android and Play are quite serious. Hiroshi raised this at Google Leads; as follow up from that we had a discussion yesterday with Don, Hiroshi and execs from several PAs to brainstorm a potential Google-wide deal to put in front of Epic across Cloud, YouTube, Yeti and Play. Dollar value could be in the $100–200M range. Because of the timing of the Android launch, we need to float this conceptually with Epic no later than early in the week of July 23. As such if we need preliminary approval from BC to negotiate in this range, it seems we'd have to do that on Monday. [Michael Murphy noted that BC can approve commercial commitments provided 2018 spend is within the approved annual plan, and that deals exceeding $150M require Sundar's approval; above $250M requires board sign-off.] Donald Harrison subsequently flagged: 'This is a critical matter — we want to have a broad discussion on this with Philipp, Sundar, Ruth, Kent (plus Hiroshi/Jamie) as soon as possible.'

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Court Exhibit
In re Google Play Store Antitrust Litigation (Epic v. Google)
3:21-md-02981 (CAND), Doc. 886-99, filed 2023-12-21
July 11, 2018
Public domain
View the primary source →