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Comment by arcanus | Hacker News Reader

Honest statement: maybe its because I'm a child of the 80s, and so grew up around media with strong dystopian/cyberpunk styling...

But I've always wondered why more tech companies and corporations don't embrace this aesthetic. The buildings are so distinctive and striking that it would result in very strong branding. And while motivated by questionable ethics, we do associate megacorps in fiction with bleeding edge technology and incredible capabilities.

It is not as if anyone takes the Google happy colors and 'don't be evil' motto as actually indicative of ethical behavior. Conversely, I don't think an insidious aesthetic would imply 'we are doing bad things' as much as a fun nod to sci-fi high tech.

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> It is not as if anyone takes the Google happy colors and 'don't be evil' motto as actually indicative of ethical behavior

I ordered a Google Home for my dad for Christmas. It's ridiculous the only color available is white. I'm sure they are trying to avoid the 1984/2001 aesthetic by making it look as cuddly as possible, but they are just trading that for a Brave New World/I, Robot aesthetic. On top of that, it really does look like an air freshener.

I was up in the air between a Google Home and an Echo Dot for him, and the color alone would have been enough to sway me to the Dot, but I ordered just a few minutes too late for it to arrive by Christmas. I mean, that white is going to look absolutely awful in such a short time because they put capacitive controls under it. Have you ever seen the palm rests of the White Macbooks? They look like pit stains on the favorite undershirt of a very sweaty man.

I wish Google would stop copying the "look at me" aesthetic of Apple. I like where Amazon was going with the Dot. It looks nice enough that nobody is going to complain if they see it, but it blends in well enough that you probably won't see it unless you look for it. Google products aren't the cheapest things, but they don't "waste" enough money on design elements for them to actually stand up as aesthetic objects like Apple products do.

https://store.google.com/product/google_home_base

What do you mean by only color available being white?

Not sure, maybe the top is only white? I dont actually know but I assume that's what GP was talking about.

Yeah, definitely talking about the top of the device. I thought that was obvious from context, since the bottom appears to be silver in the photos I've seen, and you only interact with the top of the device.

It may be that the monolithic edifices that typify so many favorite dystopian worlds don't lend themselves to scaling up or down as an organization grows or contracts.

Perhaps only organizations that are immune to market vagaries can handle an architecture that does not respond easily to growth/change. Also, many prefer to lease rather than own, and real estate developers are almost universally conservative and conventional, thus unlikely to underwrite the costs of aesthetically significant architecture.

(In my experience it costs at least twice as much to construct things in a way that is outside standard convention.)

A mixed example, Apple's new campus is a more friendly-faced monolith, but will be difficult to expand without breaking the trademark purity of its circular geometry. (An aside, at least as shown in photos, that building puts my creative mind to sleep and carries a message of conformity, like any monoculture gone to far.)

My dad, who was a historian and business professor, told me once that you could trace the start of the decline of a company when they completed their showcase palace headquarters. The problem is they became focused on the edifice rather than their business.

I wonder how much of that is some sort of reversion to the mean though. I.e. you often don't build a showcase palace headquarters until you've clearly been a great success. Not always of course. Executive ego can't be discounted in some cases.

However, to the degree a showcase gets built when a company is riding high and growing, it's not unusual that looking out 5 or 10 years, that company won't be doing so well.

Thank you for this little nugget of wisdom! It puts one of my past employers into a relevant context.

Drive by Apple's new mothership building in Cupertino, and you'll get that feeling. Latest drone imagery (4K): [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh_9_1FX0Yk

"Nothing fails like success"

The new Salesforce headquarters in S.F. is rather ominous, not only for that company but for the state of the tech boom in general.

Apple already kind of does - their new "Mothership" in Cupertino is grand in scale and has a huge curtain wall that goes all the way around the building.

I don't know if it's intentional, but in my mind Apple is also "that organization with the eerily clean white interior" in real life. They are also unsurprisingly very secretive in their organization; I've heard their engineers have little idea what other other teams are doing, but it's a rumour http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsceticAesthetic

> I've always wondered why more tech companies and corporations don't embrace this aesthetic

The Oracle Corporation's global HQ in Redwood City[0] does look a little like the Bonaventure Hotel[1] referenced in the original article, and has been used as a stand-in for at least one dystopian sci-fi megacorp[2].

[0] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=oracle+headquarters+redwoo...

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Bonaventure+Hotel&tbm=isch

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_Genisys#Filming

I always liked those buildings. I thought it was an interesting coincidence that their HQ looks exactly like the stereotypical database icon: https://www.google.com/search?q=database+logo

It is not as if anyone takes the Google happy colors and 'don't be evil' motto as actually indicative of ethical behavior.

How about, "Evil, it's what we do!" Followed by, "Shush, you're just jealous!"

> It is not as if anyone takes the Google happy colors and 'don't be evil' motto as actually indicative of ethical behavior.

It's also not as if the sterility that was some kind of "opposite"? For me it's certainly closer to a factory floor than to, say, Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

> Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

-- E. F. Schumacher [ https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106019678082;vi... ]

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