I was at google while the nymwars were going on. The debate was just as heated and polarizing inside google as it was externally. I'm also surprised (pleasantly) to see someone use the A word here. I think this is an attempt to start over after exit and/or political defeat of certain high level execs. But I also think it may be too late. G+ has missed the bus to be anything more than the butt of jokes and hilarious memes (A google employee ate a donut, here's a picture etc..). Certainly a lesson in there somewhere about hubris and corrupting influence of power etc.

Vic did, in fact, approve this change well before he left. (It wasn't just an overnight switch flip, hence why it took a while to actually go live - policy documents have to be rewritten and approved, ux flows have to be modified, etc.)

Maybe. You seem to have heard it directly from Vic. I think the more plausible scenario is the CEO finally having had enough and pulling the plug on both the name policy as well as Vic's tenure at google. How this sequence of events is then presented to the rest of the public (including rest of Google) would then be a matter of following a corporate playbook written by experts in that domain.

You're allowed to be cynical, but I'm also allowed to tell you that you don't know how Google works internally. :)

Aren't "apologies" fairly common? A genuine apology for the reasons people think you should apologize is much rarer, corporate communications or not.

Frankly this Google apology doesn't seem that genuine to me. What are they actually apologizing for:

> We know you've been calling for this change for a while.

should've done what people wanted, okay ...

> We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users

No, their names policy was pretty clear actually. Legal names only.

> unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users

Is there a way to understate this any more? Any way we can make it vaguer too?

Some real bullshit pr speak right there.

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They apologize for not listening and "being unclear" about their names policy. Seems pretty worthless and insincere to me. Though i do still applaud their decision to not continue a horrible policy, like i would applaud a company deciding to revise hiring policy to be less discriminatory: would have been nice from the start, before a lot of damage was already done.

I'm happy at least someone noticed that. It's not an easy sell to any communications person anywhere in the industry. :)