Big Tech Strategy Exposed: Five Memos on How They Milk You
What follows is fiction — five internal memos I wrote, imagining how each of the giants might brief its own executives behind closed doors. Not one is real. But every strategy in them is drawn from the documented record: the products they shipped, the studies they buried, the fines they paid. This is what the truth would look like if it were typed on company letterhead and marked confidential. Read them the way they'd be read in the boardroom — with satisfaction.
MEMO 01 — GOOGLE
CONFIDENTIAL // INTERNAL STRATEGY // DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
Team,
Let's start with our finest achievement: the motto. "Don't be evil." We put it in our code of conduct in the early days, and it did more work than any product we ever shipped. It told the world we were the good ones — the friendly engineers who'd never do what the old monopolies did. The beauty is that we quietly retired it once it had served its purpose. By then, trust was banked. You cannot buy that kind of cover; we got it for free, and we spent it for twenty years.
Remember the arc, because it's a masterpiece. We gave them Search in 1998 and made the world's knowledge free — free, so no one would ask who pays. In 2004 we gave them Gmail, a gigabyte of storage when rivals offered megabytes, and in exchange our machines read every word to target ads. They cheered. We gave them Maps, and they handed us their every movement, forever. We gave them Android, and now we sit under two-thirds of the phones on Earth. We gave them Chrome, the window through which they see the whole internet — a window we own.
Every gift was a sensor. That is the doctrine. We are not a search company or a phone company; we are the largest apparatus for knowing human beings ever assembled, and knowing is what we sell. The direction of travel is simple: from answering their questions to anticipating them, from reading their screens to acting on them. Our new assistant already reads every app on the device. Soon it won't wait to be asked at all.
Do not be evil. Just be everywhere.
— G.
MEMO 02 — APPLE
CONFIDENTIAL // INTERNAL STRATEGY // DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
Colleagues,
Our position is unique, and we must protect it: we are the ones who charge them for the privilege of being enclosed, and they thank us in cash.
The history is instructive. The iPod in 2001, then iTunes — that was the first taste of the garden, and the first time we taught them a truth we've relied on ever since: convenience is a leash they hold willingly. The iPhone made us indispensable. The App Store made us the toll booth on an entire economy. And privacy — privacy became our masterstroke. We put it on billboards, and it is real: we guard their data from everyone. We simply never mention the exception. Everyone, except us.
Understand the elegance of the wall. Their photos, their messages, their friends, their purchases — all of it lives inside a garden they may enter but never comfortably leave. Make switching painful. Make repair difficult; let them believe the device was never quite theirs to open. Charge premium prices and call it dignity, call it craftsmanship, call it care. They will pay the most of any customers on Earth and own the least, and they will feel superior doing it.
The regulators in Brussels are a nuisance, forever demanding we unlock the door. Comply slowly. Comply beautifully. The garden holds.
— A.
MEMO 03 — META
CONFIDENTIAL // INTERNAL STRATEGY // DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
Everyone,
This is the one we're proudest of, so let's be candid among ourselves.
We began by connecting people, and that was genuine — families across oceans, old friends found, the grandmother watching grandchildren grow on a screen. Hold on to that story; it is our shield, and it happens to be true. But the real breakthrough came in 2009 with a single button. "Like." Overnight we turned human approval into data, and human insecurity into engagement. Then the Feed — the infinite scroll, the pull with no bottom — and we learned to measure a person by the hours we could take.
And we learned the thing we can only say in this room: the young ones are the best ones. Their attention is the purest, their habits the most formable, their defences the weakest. We had the internal research on what our products did to them. We understood the harm. We optimised anyway, because a teenager's night-time scroll is worth more than their sleep is to us. When the states took us to court, we paid seventeen billion to settle it and moved on. Frame that number correctly: it is not a punishment. It is a licence fee, and a cheap one, against the lifetime value of the attention we harvest.
The plan does not change. Wherever human beings gather their focus, we will be there to convert it. Keep them scrolling. We are not finished with them.
— M.
MEMO 04 — AMAZON
CONFIDENTIAL // INTERNAL STRATEGY // DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
Team,
Our genius is that we made ourselves feel like a kindness. We are not a kindness. We are the last shelf standing, and we are glad of it.
Trace the path. We began with books, then became the everything store. The Kindle in 2007 was the turning point they never noticed — we made reading effortless and, in the same motion, made a "purchased" book something we could alter or remove from their device at will. They stopped owning; they started licensing, and they called it convenience. Then Prime — we sold them the removal of friction itself, and once a person expects the world by morning, they never go back. Then Alexa, which they carried into their own homes and switched on, so that we might listen. They paid us to install our ear in their kitchen.
Here is the doctrine. Convenience is the anaesthetic; dependency is the operation. We know what they own, what they buy, what they're about to want. We run our marketplace and compete inside it at once, promoting our own goods over the sellers who have no choice but to live on our shelf. Behind the frictionless door, the warehouse runs its people to the edge — but the customer never sees the price, and a price unseen is a price gladly paid.
Keep the door frictionless. Keep the shelf ours. Keep listening.
— A.
MEMO 05 — MICROSOFT
CONFIDENTIAL // INTERNAL STRATEGY // DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
Colleagues,
Let the others chase attention and scandal. We chose something more durable: to become the ground beneath everyone's feet. You do not need to seduce a person who cannot function without you.
The history is quiet and total. Windows became the floor the working world stands on. Office became the language of every document it produces. In the '90s we showed, with Internet Explorer, how completely we could crush a market simply by owning the ground it stood on — a lesson we never unlearned, only refined. We did not need people to love us. We needed them to be unable to leave, and a generation woke up one morning already inside our walls, unable to remember choosing them.
Now the model perfects itself. We moved them from owning software to renting it — the subscription that never ends, the work they lease back from us month after month, forever. And Copilot is the next enclosure: AI folded into every document, every email, every meeting, whether they asked for it or not, until they cannot compose a sentence at work without us in the room. No addictive feed to defend in court. No memo like this that could embarrass us. Just a quiet hand resting on every keyboard on Earth.
That is not villainy. That is infrastructure. And infrastructure is forever.
— M.