Hacker News Reader

Comment by devcpp | Hacker News Reader

>This is why we can't have nice things

More like this is why we can't have nice promises. Promises, on their own, are useless. Why should you get the PR boost from an openness promise if you don't actually end up fulfilling it? This is pretty much like false advertising, where you promise some aspects of a product and end up delivering something different. No matter your excuse, this is wrong and unfair to competitors.

But business is business and companies still end up making those weak promises to grab some more market share.

View on HN

Because it wasn't a god damned promise!! There should be nothing wrong with saying "this is our current plan" and that plan changing down the road (when it makes sense to change).

Anyone who has ever worked on anything in their life knows that plans change. Sometimes plans change to something else that's better. Sometimes ideas that are great on paper don't work in practice and need to be scrapped. Sometimes a plan is a great idea but an unanticipated roadblock makes it impossible or prohibitively expensive to accomplish.

So yes. Companies can never say anything publicly until it's already done. And I think that's a god damned shame. So again I say, this is why we can't have nice things.

Companies can never say anything publicly until it's already done. And I think that's a god damned shame.

Why?

Of course plans change can change.

That said, we all know "that guy". You know, the slick "idea guy" marketer who always has grand plans but never follows through? Who jumps on any hot PR topic that gets him publicity? After a while, you sort of tune him out, because you know his plans never amount to anything.

I have no idea whether cloudflares efforts fall into this pattern. But I know enough companies that behave this way that I think I can safely say that not all corporate "plans" are announced with the intentions of actually following through on them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com