I miss the days when I'd see a HN post to a Google project and be excited to check it out. I don't necessarily fault Google--they have to do what makes sense for their business. But I wish, at the very least from a PR perspective, more companies would create cool things without worrying about whether they can be monetized.
I do miss it too. What is the point in having so much money if you can't do exciting, useful, and cool stuff.
The basic equation:
- Small, nimble, fun, fast, low amount of cash, interesting work, ease to deploy
- Big, fat, tedious, slow, extensive supply of cash, maybe some interesting work at most, pain to get anything deployed