Imagine if nobody tweeted, facebooked, blogged about, or posted to hacker news anything about Google, or Apple's next product release? Would they notice? Would the world end? Would we no-longer be fanboys?
Most of the things these companies release are interesting, and affect our lives in one way or another. I'm sure that individual engineers in these companies get a little thrill of pride when they are mentioned in HN.
So yeah, they would notice - it would probably get posted by a HN reader inside the corporation.
I don't think that any result, silence or otherwise would be the end of the world for anyone. Their own PR engines are huge.
I cannot help but feel that we deserve better than to be PR tools for large corporations. Is Apple's rumored tablet really worth the geekgasms that people are having about it? Google's PR machine has been far, far grander than the reality of it's products. I'm not really sure if they've had a killer app since Gmail, but everything else has been adeptly hyped to death through false scarcity and the rumor mill.
So yeah, they would notice - it would probably get posted by a HN reader inside the corporation.
I don't think that any result, silence or otherwise would be the end of the world for anyone. Their own PR engines are huge.