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Comment by yupper32 | Hacker News Reader

The HN response here is a pretty good demo with regards to why large scale companies have a hard time trying out new things, IMO. And why smaller companies are able to bubble to the top on occasion.

This is clearly a pet project of some sort, and yet there are dozens of feature requests and bug reports on HN, as if it should be a fully fleshed out Google product.

Why can't an employee from some Big-N company make something for fun on the company domain? If it becomes popular, maybe the company would put real resources to it. And if it doesn't, why care so much?

The answer is clear with the HN response. If HN, a group that should particularly appreciate it, can't handle it, the public certainly can't.

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> Why can't an employee from some Big-N company make something for fun on the company domain?

Because it's under the company domain?

Anything carrying its brand is linked to the company. You can't be a big company and an humble startup at the same time. If Google wanted to provide an opportunity for its employees to launch funny products without pressure they would give them a separate domain. As is, they do it this way because they think it's good marketing. That people expect big company support from big company websites go with the territory.

I work for another one of these big companies... The other domain thing is exactly how we handle it

And it works surprisingly well. 95% of the public is either unwilling to do the leg work to find those connections or doesn't know how.

I still have to tell people that waymo is just the self-driving car initiative from Google under a new business organization.

If this was treated as a linked-to-Google property, it would have been Google Travel - Weather Trends and would've been canceled along with the rest of Google Travel like 87% of their projects.

> The HN response here is a pretty good demo with regards to why large scale companies have a hard time trying out new things, IMO. And why smaller companies are able to bubble to the top on occasion.

I think your type of response may also indicate why. Some commenters and large companies' sensitivities are too high to accept/provide genuine feedback and therefore have a hard time trying new things. Other commenters and smaller companies aren't so sensitive and build/react accordingly.

Maybe, but at the same time, often when changes happen to a product at a large company, a large amount of the public gets pissed. It's often not "hey we have some feedback", it's "hey we're going to go shoot up your HQ if you don't change xyz back to the way it was".

You've seen people's reactions to stuff like Reddit/Facebook/Youtube redesigns, right? It's wild. And those are relatively small things.

So I feel like the "sensitivities" you're talking about are a bit imbalanced here between users of a large company and the large company.

While your overall point remains, the Reddit redesign has been so user hostile, especially on mobile, that it’s a pretty poor example.

Any major changes are indeed fundamentally more difficult to make at the scales these companies operate at simply because they impacted orders of magnitude more users.

I think it’s great and cool that they did this.

I wait for them to kill the project.

The problem is that if a company uses its name and charges the same amount as it’s other services there is an inbuilt level of expectation which leads to disappointment.

Personally I can’t think of a single application that couldn’t be better in some way.

The solution to this would be to temper peoples expectations and host these types of projects under a different domain that clearly explains that the project is very early in production. Providing an opportunity to give feedback would also make people feel more involved in the projects and give projects that have no clear vision some guidance.

"Charges"?

Yes. I am trading my privacy and time for use of their service.

Many people seem to disagree here but human expectations are a real phenomenon. Not to say these expectations are fair.

My personal reaction to the link was amusement. It was like finding a hamburger and fries on the menu of a fine dining restaurant.

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