Ouch... Seems like he’s just bitter about his engineers’ senses of humor?
I can name numerous Google pranks that were obviously stupid and legitimately made me chuckle and then move on with my day — their toilet-powered ISP, Rick Rolling YouTube viewers, Google Maps PacMan, even Contoso switching from O365 to Google Apps (there’s a list of dozens more of them on Wikipedia [0]).
Sure, some of them were a bust, like adding a mic drop GIF to outgoing Gmail messages without clear consent. Large corporations shouldn’t be literally pranking their users. But can anyone name a Microsoft joke off the top of your head?
Maybe I’m in the minority on HN, but I say if you’re confident that you employ some funny engineers who can limit themselves to obvious humor, especially if you’re a small company, why not keep this silly 500+ year tradition alive and well? :)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_April_Fools%2...