Nice try. 1) Moderately successful, but not too successful (my Foo can't compete with Bar) Actual issue: They use their success to bludgeon competitors to dea

Nice try. 1) Moderately successful, but not too successful (my Foo can't compete with Bar) Actual issue: They use their success to bludgeon competitors to death. E.g. what Microsoft used to do to Linux, which is why we still don't have a viable Linux on desktop even though nearly everyone agrees that they only use Windows 10 because they have to and not because they want to. Plus, now that Microsoft has apparently "done a 180 on open source" (read: we used the bludgeoning time to figure out how to profit from OSS), their success is the equivalent of breaking a sleeping man's knee and handing him a stick to walk, and then patting yourself for your generosity. 2) Run by at most 20 people (why do they need so many people, me and my buddy could do it in a week!) Actual issue: They don't provide support commensurate to the number of people building it once the project's hype factor goes down. A good example is nearly every not-very-cool-anymore OSS library which was announced with great hype 4 years ago, is not used a lot today, and the employees of the BigCo treat everyone who raises GitHub issues with general disdain and disinterest. Although, to be fair, I think this is the fault of the suckers who go and use this OSS library. As they say "Fool me once..." 3) Maintains all products/features indefinitely even if less then 1% of the users use it (Google killed RSS Reader) Actual issue: Unlike BigCo, which can kill whatever product they want and not face the smallest problem, the user base of these products in terms of actual usage is so big, it can support a company or two or twenty. People who are investing the time to build on your bloody platform are regularly treated in the same way Mark Z thinks of his user base ("dumb fucks"). 4) Directs all earnings back into the product (they have so much money, surely they can afford to all maintain all products/features indefinitely) Actual issue: Not actually committing resources to product support. Here is something which should make you laugh, if it didn't also make you cry in case you are a Google Cloud developer (you cannot remove yourself from a Google Cloud project that someone else added you into): https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35903415 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35903415 The issue is marked as priority: P2, severity: S2. Really? And Mr Thomas Kurian wants developers to evangelize Google Cloud when they wouldn't even take care of these kinds of things for over 5 years? 5) Pays below market rates (engineers make too much money) Actual issue: Hard to say, because on the one hand, they are definitely overpaid with respect to the difference between their actual performance and their own perception of it (for e.g. even the biggest supporters of the tech that comes from BigCo, when pressed, will point out a laundry list of bugs). Not to mention the perennially lousy support on the projects deemed by the engineers as not-sexy-anymore. On the other hand, if some of these folks end up going to jail for things such as trying to manipulate elections (which I firmly believe is a question of when and not if), then you want them to be compensated for that risk. 6) Grows organically with no VC/investor money Actual issue: Taking investor money is just a neon warning sign today: "expect user hostile behavior in our product very soon". If the vast majority of VC backed companies didn't become user hostile, this wouldn't have been a big issue. 7) Makes no mistakes. All experiments end up being total hits / cash cows forever. Actual issue: these experiments are often accompanied by extreme hype and overpromising. To be fair, once again, I say "Fool me once..." Did you notice I finally put most of the blame on the people who trust BigCo, because they repeatedly act like suckers? There is indeed a sucker born every minute, and the surest sign of that is the fact that people are actually signing up for something like Facebook Shops. So the HN crowd is the voice of the skeptic. I actually hope it is never pleased about anything.