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Comment by d2viant | Hacker News Reader

I think applying that degree of psychological analysis to such a trivial situation is a bit insulting to people who actually suffer from genuine rejection. What you're saying could be said about any closed beta that Google has done for any of their products. I have yet to meet or hear about anybody emotionally scarred from those experiences. Have you?

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It's not an issue of being emotionally scarred it's an issue of losing one's passion.

Again it's not the same as other closed Betas. It's a movement towards an entirely different computing model. One that not everyone accepts is valid (in fact I'd argue most don't think a completely browser based computing experience is valid at this point). So what Google needs more than anything is people who are passionate about that idea and who will strongly advocate for it.

So when people are rejected from the program I don't believe they'll cry but I do believe they'll feel less passionate about the idea as a whole.

I truly believe that most people are intelligent enough to understand that Google cannot gift an unlimited number of laptops and that randomness is the determining factor in who gets one and who doesn’t. 60,000 laptops mean that 1 in 5000 Americans will get one. Is that not enough? I also don’t think that there is any way you can send out a few thousand free laptops without causing hype …

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