I don't get where this sentiment comes from. Ever. They are a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company. Even if they hold onto their startup-esque purism fo

I don't get where this sentiment comes from. Ever. They are a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company. Even if they hold onto their startup-esque purism for a decade after their founding, they of course fall from grace into the profit motive pitfall because that is how the investor driven market capitalism system works. Never put blind faith in a corporate entity, because they all transition from consumer-driven-product-with-creative-vision to maximize-stockholder-returns-and-short-term-profit. It is how you do business in the big leagues. Google just had the lucky case of having a slow transition, probably due to good decisions in the early years. I get that HN has this startup culture where creative people come up with "cool things" to sell, and are product oriented rather than profit oriented (though a lot of them seem to love the idea of selling the business off to a big business like Google, walking away with the pocket change, and watching it flounder into obscurity under corporate oversight...) but big business isn't run by people who have product vision, they have profit vision, and these companies are the amalgam of hundreds of managers and overseers that don't have collective vision and can thus only drive it towards what they can all agree on - making higher returns. It happens to the best of them.