A Desultory Exploration Into Some Weird Google Calendar Stuff
Jay Peters
In the last week or so, you may have heard some noise about Google changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" on Google Maps. Yesterday, they really did it. Go to Google Maps right now and you'll see it.
The whole thing is silly and pedantic and feels like a capitulation to right wing expansionists, but hey, Google is in the war business so who could expect any different. Yet I want to explore another odd thing that happened in the Google-verse this week.
In the past, users of the extremely ubiquitous Google Calendar software would see labels for certain months or days with cultural holidays or events. Black History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Pride month, that sort of thing. Sometime last year, though, Google decided to do away with such frivolities and opted for a more streamlined approach.
According to the article linked above, Google uses an API through timeanddate.com for regional holiday recognition, allowing them to cover an audience globally without having to do too much extra work. That service does not include certain cultural events, so Google would add them manually to the default calendar. The holidays, remembrances, and other events they'd add include:
- Pride
- Black History Month
- Indigenous People Month
- Jewish Heritage
- Holocaust Remembrance Day
- Hispanic Heritage
Imagine, for a moment, you are a product manager for Google. Aside for making a boat load of money, you have to somehow manually add all these little local celebrations across the globe to any user of Google Calendar. So say there's a different month for Pride in a European country, you'll have to manually add that.
According to Google, this became too strenuous and difficult to scale, forcing them to remove those recognitions from the calendar and just stick to a more streamlined approach via the timeanddate API.
Their statement in the article above says that they made this change in mid-2024, before there even was a president whose boots looked real tasty. Coincidentally, a user made a pretty direct request on the GCal Help forum around this time. Take a look:
To be honest with you, I would be extremely surprised if product people at Google saw this one solitary post related to this subject and decided to throw away the baby with the bathwater. At the same time, I can see their thinking. It's cheaper and easier for us to do if we just have an automatic implementation and not one that requires manually updating celebratory events around the world, and now we even have a user-based reason to do so.
This anecdote is not one we should necessarily think about in the specific context of Google's genuflection to the king, especially as it happened well before the election. But what it should illuminate is a fundamental thinking that these companies have, and one that is inherently opposed to any perceivable ethic or coherent mission.
Let's take Google's assertion at face value. Here's what their statement says:
We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable. So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.
So, okay. Some people (one dude) are complaining that they see events they don't like, others are frustrated the ones that they want aren't there at all. Google product managers decide, y'know what, let's just make this super easy, that way if people care enough they can take action themselves. It isn't "scalable" or "sustainable" to do it another way.
I humbly ask, though, what a company that profited over $100 billion in 2024 (up from $74 billion in 2023) is so worried about scalability and sustainability for. Sure, I understand these concerns when you're building data centers in the nine digit range, but this is a tiny feature on one of many products. You could pay someone 50k a year and their entire job could be manually updating global holidays, observances, and celebrations. You could crowd-source this, you could sic one of your new AI products on it, anything between "We will add Holocaust Remembrance Day to GCal by default" and "We will not add a single one of these celebrations." You could have an intern do this. But instead we get this zero-sum nonsense.
I want to stress that one individual decision like this is practically nothing. At the end of the day, I wonder what kind of GCal users actually and sincerely give a shit, especially when it seems it took everyone over 6 months to notice. But what's important to consider is that this kind of decision making permeates across industries and management levels.
In a world where it would be a minor inconvenience to upkeep a feature that ostensibly aligns with or promotes our company values of inclusion and diversity, we will always choose the easy way out.
For as much marketing material Disney, Netflix, Google, Apple, Meta, or Amazon put out about how important they are, how grateful we all should be for the innovations and conveniences they have brought to our lives, they are still ultimately beholden to this kind of zero-sum, bottom line decision making.
So yes, it's weird and bad that Google isn't recognizing Pride anymore in its products, but the real issue here is not a cosmetic rainbow banner on a grid of June days. It is an endemic form of prioritization that will always put the comfort and ease of the company over ideology or a sort of commitment to a better world. One individual all-or-nothing decision may just mean fewer holidays on a calendar, an entire organizational pathology of dollars over sense, ease over challenge, and comfort over stress means much more.
And the thing is, I can hear you say "But Alex, that's business. That is how capitalism works." It reduces inefficiencies, it promotes the bottom line over humanist values. Fine! I agree! Then I would really like these same companies that have told us for generations that we need them for some moral or society advancing purpose to stop telling us that. Don't tell me your app is for connection, or freedom of speech, or learning, or being inspired, or whatever if when you brush up against one minor scuffing obstacle you instantly decide it's too hard. The work of inspiring people, of making the world a better place, of promoting ideas and symbols (and holidays) you think are positive cannot simply just stop when it is too hard or too expensive.
If you actually believe we should respect you, value you, defend you against foreign hackers, whatever, then give us a reason to. Until then, you're just picking pennies off the sidewalk while the city burns around you.
