> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things?
Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that.
If you think the buttons in Gmail are bad, check out the UI of almost any site or app made by a randomly chosen small company. Doing things well is hard and doing things not very well is often sufficient. We take for granted that small businesses are kinda crappy at almost everything and yet still we get what we need done and the world moves on.
For example, my local luxury chocolatier is Theo. They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code). But when you type in a number, it tries to autocomplete addresses so you end up on some random street at an address that starts with your zip code. This is literally me picking the first small-ish business I could think of and clicking around for less than a minute.
We notice the mistakes of giant companies because we spend 99% of our life these days interacting with them and because the mean quality out of giant companies is somewhat higher, so the mistakes stand out as relatively worse.
> Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that.
I don't think that's necessarily what is implied. Small companies make decisions with many orders of magnitude less resources applied to making those decisions, so we expect the outcomes to be significantly worse on average. If Google spends 100,000 times the resources on its decisions but the outcome is only 10x better than the output of a random small company, that is notable.
The real problem is that small companies assume that Google must know what’s it’s doing and that even though google is trying to solve different problems, the only right thing to do is try to copy them.
> They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code
It looks like Theo is a US company, so perhaps "zip code" is more appropriate but those of us in the rest of the world are generally frustrated by websites which present a form field which could be called the generic 'postal code', meaningful to anyone in the world, labelled as 'zip code', something which is specific to the US.
Looking at the Theo website, it appears they use BigCommerce, which is an Australian ecommerce as a service site, which explains why they don't use 'zip code'. Although, your usability complaint about the behaviour of the field absolutely stacks up and suggests they might be using the wrong form widget there.
Many many sites have these "it's more easier and also convenient I swear" finder pages that refuse to just give you a map to click on. Wanna see if you can pick something up there next time you're in $city? Better google for a zip code in that city.
In this way there are a lot of web developers making money preventing businesses from acquiring all of the customers who might be interested in them.
"It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code" really? Get off your US centric view of the world my friend (which is often a UI problem in and of itself) only the US and Philippines use Zip codes.
Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that.
If you think the buttons in Gmail are bad, check out the UI of almost any site or app made by a randomly chosen small company. Doing things well is hard and doing things not very well is often sufficient. We take for granted that small businesses are kinda crappy at almost everything and yet still we get what we need done and the world moves on.
For example, my local luxury chocolatier is Theo. They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code). But when you type in a number, it tries to autocomplete addresses so you end up on some random street at an address that starts with your zip code. This is literally me picking the first small-ish business I could think of and clicking around for less than a minute.
We notice the mistakes of giant companies because we spend 99% of our life these days interacting with them and because the mean quality out of giant companies is somewhat higher, so the mistakes stand out as relatively worse.