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Comment by johnrob | Hacker News Reader

Given the hype growing around Hipmunk, I'm surprised that none of the current players (i.e. kayak) have responded. Hipmunk's main innovation is the UI - if you were Kayak, and you already had a backend in place, wouldn't you assign at least one designer/developer to play around with novel UIs? Maybe launch a site on a different domain that can act as an R&D and marketing testbed for a new type of search engine?

It astounds me how lazy these companies appear to be (from the outside of course). A new hot startup launches, and they don't even lift a finger as a counter measure. Even when the upstart has proven that there is more to be desired out of a typical airline search site.

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   if you were Kayak, and you already had a backend in place, wouldn't you assign at least one designer/developer to play around with novel UIs?

What's to say the current players haven't already tried those UI changes and found them less usable by the general population?

I don't know for sure, but I do know that calling the current competitors lazy is the completely wrong view (and factually incorrect). First, they deal with an older, less "techie" audience, which means different UIs are immediately viewed as confusing rather than cool. Second, they have the traffic to run A/B tests on everything, which allows them to know what such changes will do to their bottom line without having to publicly deploy or announce them.

Full disclosure: I worked on TripAdvisor Flights and was in the same YC batch as Hipmunk, though there was no overlap between the two and I actively avoided mixing the two circles, so I don't actually know anything about how Hipmunk views TA and vice-versa.

"A new hot startup launches, and they don't even lift a finger as a counter measure."

Probably because they don't think it's an improvement and they think it will go out of business on its own if they ignore it. This is what happens to most 'hot' startups anyway, and if Hipmunk is able to beat the odds then I doubt it will be because of their current UI.That's not to knock Hipmunk at all, I just think you need to lengthen your arc a little on this.

Large corporations are physically incapable of doing that (most of them, anyway). Who does the lone designer report to? Who gets him integration support from dev and ops? Who has to jump out a window when he clocks the upgrade that VP Marketing spent $400 million on last year because he liked the color scheme? (Hint: highly unlikely to be VP Marketing.)

Yeah, but come on -- we're talking about Kayak here, not General Motors or something. They're only 6 years old themselves!

Oftentimes it's because the innovations that the startup pioneers have hidden costs that become prohibitive with the big company's scale and consumer base. It's easy to prototype a feature, which is basically what a startup is. It's much harder to predict that feature's impact on all the other features in the system. Oftentimes those same new innovations have already been tried and rejected by the big companies because they result in unacceptable quality losses elsewhere.

Occasionally, the startup is right, and consumers care more about the innovations that they introduce than the features that conflict with them. In that case, the startup displaces the big company and doesn't remain a startup for long. But more often, as the startup grows, they run into the same issues that led the big company to reject the innovation in the first place. At that point, they hit a brick wall in their growth, and they either have to become lame like the big company or forego the users that need those conflicting features.

http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ offers a similar view if you choose "Time Bars" in the upper right corner in the flight list.

I read about this page one of the first times Hipmunk was discussed here, but I don't know who had it first.

Didn't hipmunk file some silly patents regarding their UI "just in case"?

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