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Comment by cfield | Hacker News Reader

I think limited scope is exactly the point made by skriticos2.

I don't doubt that a private entity is as capable of scope creep as a massive federal government institution.

But I suspect mission-fatal scope creep occurs with less frequency with private entities than with massive federal government institutions.

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"massive" being the critical word, not "private" or "federal" or "government"

Google has had plenty of scope creep but it hasn't been mission-fatal

And Google is orders of magnitude bigger by every reasonable measure than NASA both today and at the height of the Apollo programme. There are a dozen of other organizations we could point to (e.g. the largest oil or mining companies) which demonstrate that the private sector can organize on this scale quite well, thank you.

Google doesn't have products that are expected to operate perfectly 15 years from now in outer space. Google's products can survive significant defects, have bug fix turnaround times measured in minutes, and worst case, can take some downtime without too much harm.

When you talk about oil and mining companies, you mention the same ones that suffer dozens of spills, contamination incidents, and accidents? Or is there some sort of hypothetical perfect oil company with no accidents whatsoever?

I think you have absolutely no clue of just how stupifying difficult it is to get equipment into space and surviving a reasonable amount of time.

I think you have absolutely no clue of just how stupifying difficult it is to get equipment into space and surviving a reasonable amount of time.

And yet the latest football game is broadcast worldwide flawlessly.

Because it's the exact same rehearsed process that's performed for years at a time on hardware and software that is considerably safer than off-the-shelf computer hardware.

You say the latest, but 2013 wasn't that long ago.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2012/story/_/id/8911864/2013...

> And yet the latest football game is broadcast worldwide flawlessly.

I dunno, I've often seen flaws in the broadcast of the latest football game. I think it would be more accurate to say "the latest football game is usually broadcast worldwide with flaws that are within the tolerances viewers are willing to accept", but then, people rarely die because of broadcast glitches in football games, so the tolerances there may be fairly lenient.

How do you reckon? iirc, close to half a million people worked on Apollo; that's much bigger than Google. I don't think there are any private sector organizations significantly bigger than that figure?

"half a million people worked at Apollo" -- that number included contractors as well, a word which has slightly different meaning within government. It'd be as if we included key divisions of Intel and Cisco inside of Google's numbers.

I would argue that Google does a lot of things poorly, which turn out to not be a big deal in the sector they are in but would certainly be a problem in aerospace. This isn't a knock on Google, the requirements are just different.

Yes it has. Their search result pages are crap lately, overcomplicated with ads everywhere; it's the same quality level as Yahoo circa 2002. Google is in decline; a slow decline perhaps, but it's happening.

"..same quality level as Yahoo circa 2002." Are you serious?

Yes I am. Red Queen Rule applies - I'm sure Google's tech has got better, but so has that of the SEO folk.

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