How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

I remember Urs arguing for this at TGIF quite some time ago. He said legal costs were increasing exponentially while the value of old email was only linear, which was unsustainable.

One outcome of this was to wipe a number of ongoing scientific discussions I was having with external collaborators. I'm used to people having the last 30 years of mail on hand to be able to carry out extremely long, complex projects.

Good point. To add to that, I hazard a guess that the legal costs are about collecting everything for discovery, and not necessarily about them causing Google to lose legal cases.