What are you doing at work that you don't want people looking over your shoulder? Serious question by the way - it always comes up in work environments that some people are pretty against the lack of privacy that comes along with these types of set ups, but really if you are at work there shouldn't be too much (if anything) on your screen which is private.
I'm a big fan of bull pen type environments, where it's wide open spaces and everyone is together with no walls between.
If you have that, and also offer a few "quiet rooms" where you can go if things are loud or you need to check your personal email, I don't see what the problem is.
> I'm a big fan of bull pen type environments, where it's wide open spaces and everyone is together with no walls between.
Visual and audio noise.
They're really bad for productivity of creators. They're good for managers / coordinators / investors.
The standard argument that "you can wear headphones" doesn't work for serious design work. Pounding music is great for grinding through list-ish stuff, but not for creativity.
It's like sleep deprivation. People who are sleep deprived will insist "I'm fine -- I just need a coffee", but their performance is much lower than those who are well rested.
EDIT> I'm not responding to the over-the-shoulder question here. I find it very distracting to see others' faces, though, e.g. with back-to-back monitors. Most of us are wired to pay attention to faces, so they cause a lot of visual noise.
At this point in my career, open-concept offices with > 4 or so people are a deal breaker. It makes me hate programming.
I just don't like somebody looking at my monitor. I also don't like somebody looking over my shoulder when I'm reading a book or a newspaper, and there's nothing to hide there. It just makes me nervous. I just don't like being on display and knowing that at all times somebody could be watching me and I wouldn't even know it. That's why I like the layout of our office. We are all together, not 2 meters apart from each other, but everybody can "hide" behind his monitor(s) and have his privacy. Also the way we are organized I don't see others people's faces unless I want to (JabavuAdams pointed this out in his reply to you)
"The bottom line is this: Amazon trades at more than three times Apple's current valuation, eight times RIM's valuation and just about two and a half times Google's valuation. This is simply way too high."
The article is almost laughable in it's simplicity - if you take CNN/Fortune articles seriously please don't invest your money. This article is overly focusing on one antiquated notation that P/E is the only thing that matters, an idea that isn't taken seriously by anyone close to Wall Street or finance any more (if it ever was, seems like this idea is only perpetuated by "pop" finance drivel such as Fortune).
There are several more interesting metrics to look at when evaluating a stock, including cash flow, profit margin, return on equity, growth rates, and many more.
Amazon has been consistently growing in double digits throughout the recession. They have a profit margin of 3% (compared to Apple's lofty 20%). They have a market cap of 80 billion with annual sales of 24 billion versus Apple's market cap of 280 billion with annual sales of 65 billion.
Where is Amazon's growth ceiling in their respective markets? Where is Apple's? What is next for Apple after the iPad (which missed sales targets)?
If you are going to invest in a stock, you need to ask these tough questions and think for yourself. You can't just look at a P/E ratio and know whether a company is over or under valued. Amazon rode the recession with a 40+ P/E ratio, and now the market is picking up again. Decide for yourself whether it is risky or not to invest in AMZN.
Y'know, I agree with you, but I think you're arguing poorly.
one antiquated notation
Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's bad.
that P/E is the only thing that matters
I hate to say "strawman", but strawman. Is it really saying that P/E is the only thing that matters? I think not, otherwise it wouldn't say things like "top line growth in many ways is far more important than earnings per share."
an idea that isn't taken seriously by anyone close to Wall Street or finance any more
Argument from (dubious) authority?
only perpetuated by "pop" finance drivel such as Fortune
You're right, I'm not arguing very well. And please, I encourage any one not to take what I say very seriously either. If you want to invest, think for yourself, that is what I was really trying to say.
Well yeah, I think that pretty much goes without saying. Nobody should ever take a single "here's why I like stock X" article too seriously. But this one does provide some pretty good food for thought for anyone thinking of investing in computer/internet stocks right now.
I think I'd avoid GOOG and AAPL personally, too overpriced. Mind you, I've been saying that about GOOG since the float, so I'm frequently wrong.
I'm rooting for all the big technology companies to do really well: Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Ebay, Apple. Higher market caps means more flexibility in acquisitions, and these are the companies which aren't afraid to take risks.
Remember kids, when interviewing at private companies which offer stock rewards, always get firm answers about percentage owned and dilution. Getting 1,000,000 Facebook shares might sound good on an offer letter but without knowing the percentage that could be worth 6$.
I don't think that word means what you think it means
"Many common stocks issued today do not have par values; those that do (usually only in jurisdictions where par values are required by law) have extremely low par values (often the smallest unit of currency in circulation), for example a penny par value on a stock issued at USD$25/share."
Of course you are right, but the point remains, it is important to understand the percentage of equity that you own/will own and how that will change with future dilution.
The flip side of course is that it becomes dangerous if you rely on any of Google's free services. An extreme example, but what happens if GMail isn't profitable enough? Maybe Adsense for content isn't pulling it's weight any more (if it ever has)?
411 was a fairly useful service, and while shutting it down is probably the right business move, it pushes me more and more to move my primary email account and diversifying my advertising.
The rumor I always heard was that 411 was only around to stress-test their voice recognition backend. It really wasn't delivering ads or anything of revenue to them.
I've also heard rumors that Gmail and Adsense for Content aren't particularly profitable for Google. Of course I've also heard that the brand equity created with Gmail is very valuable and those two are extreme examples, but even based on similar rumors it's possible Google could shut down either one.
Rather than a rumor, it's just the way Google works. They are as data-driven as you can get. Think of all the AI work they're doing that one easily takes for granted: computer vision (image search, goggles, street view), nlp (translate, voice, search, etc), machine learning (search, et al), etc.
Most services have no switching cost, so it doesn't really matter. Gmail is pretty much the only Google service I can think of that would be a pain, and they'd keep Gmail even if it were losing money for a large host of reasons.
Oh, also Google Voice. When they bought that they changed my number on me and I basically stopped using it as a result.
my understanding is that "Adsense for content" is called " Google Network Web Sites" on their financial statements, and it's responsible for about 1/3 of their revenue.
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
Completely agree, the name dropping around here can get tiresome quick. There was a great article on Mint vs. Wesabe posted here recently - in my opinion we need more articles like that and less Jobs is a design master/Zuckerberg is a genius/etc.
Eleanor Roosevelt didn't say that. From Wikiquote, which is slowly approaching authoritativeness on quotes online:
This has been quoted without citation as a statement of Eleanor Roosevelt. It is usually attributed to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, but though Rickover quoted this, he did not claim to be the author of it; in "The World of the Uneducated" in The Saturday Evening Post (28 November 1959), he prefaces it with "As the unknown sage puts it..."
Honestly this seems like a cash grab from the federal government more then anything.
Knowing friends who worked at these companies, they never felt the anti competitive pressure, and several moved between the companies several times.
Most likely, the government found some clauses buried in some contracts that said in a foot note that the companies would agree not to cold call employees in their own respective companies. I don't even think it's unreasonable to have a contract along those lines if engineers are working directly with each other.
Although on the flip side, I think it might be valuable to send a message that anti-competitive agreements in general won't be tolerated and it's good to know that there are people watching this sort of thing.
I have yet to see any article actually say that there was any monetary part to the settlement. It basically just said "We promise not to do it again for 5 years".
I don't see anything wrong with these alleged agreements, per se, but it sets a terrible anti competitive precedent that is all manner of bad for employee marketability. It would be difficult to sus out the truth of what these types of agreements actually do behind the closed doors of these company's HR departments.
Do you believe in the free market? If so, you really don't see anything wrong with companies conspiring together to constrict that market for employees?
Very true - the complexity of the system also comes into the equation when things go wrong and it takes real people to figure out why an outage is happening. Highly complex systems imply longer debugging time, and at a certain point a theoretically lower up time can give you higher practical up time just because engineers can actually understand and debug it.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
It does seem to be a major problem with a lot of Google's latest inventions - they try to do too many things at once, and solve too many problems for too many people. Wave as a technology proved to be extremely useful in some certain circles, including corporate collaboration. I would wager if they marketed as a sharepoint competitor and increased the integration with google docs, it could potentially have been a money maker while giving more credibility to Google Docs.
Similar situations are going on right now with Google Buzz and even Google Mail, the execution of the "make phone calls from your mail box" seems to leave a lot to be desired. It's a feature that tries to jump out at you and grab your attention as if saying "Hey look at this, we invented something new" when really it should be almost invisible until you need to use it.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Doesn't this imply that _nothing_ is always perfection. The quote just seems to be flat out wrong.
While maybe not as elegant, but wouldn't it be better said as "Perfection is achieved, not where is nothing more to add, but when there is neither more to add nor anything to take away".
Maybe the quote has a proceeding sentence that makes it clear.
The assumption is that you're talking about some thing - design, work of art, whatever - which is accomplishing some goal. The perfection lies in removing extraneous elements without stopping it from achieving the goal. Nothing, by itself, doesn't achieve much.
Still, even your explanation is wrong. There are obviously times when adding something is required. If a car with no engine, I need to add one. I can't simply remove a wheel.
OK, put a lawnmower engine in a Hummer... Now this simply becomes an exercise in requirements gathering. Because your retort will be the goal is this accerlation curve, this torque curver, this gas mileage, etc....
And this presumes that the requirements lead to perfection. What is the goal of the Mona Lisa or Dante's Inferno? Could Micaelangelo have done less to satisfy the requirements for the Creation of Adam?
Can you point to any value in that quote?
And let me extend my last question. How many things can you list that would be perfect merely by removing things? I don't think there are many. I suspect most things, that even accomplish a goal, lack perfection due to an array of things, not simply due to having too much of anything.
I suspect Google and Yahoo don't have the same goal. Otherwise Yahoo wouldn't put a link to mail.
But this is exactly the type of reasoning that this silly quote leads to. That simply having less makes something better.
Apple could easily make a computer with no keyboard, no mouse, no OSK, no visual display. Simply a touchpad, to input a binary code that corresponds to text and numeric output that corresponds to what color and x,y location to draw pixel. Of course, this numeric output would simply be a binary light. But that's just stupid.
The reason you add something is almost always because there is a goal that you'd like to accomplish. Yahoo probably thought you should be a click away from your email account. Google doesn't.
maybe another quote will help you understand the point
“I'm sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one.” - Abraham Lincoln
The point isnt to have less, its to have as little as possible required to perform the function you want, anything extra is just extra mental energy required to be able to understand it.
Have you ever written something and then vastly reduced it because you realise you are conveying the same thing in different ways, or written software and realised you have made 2 ways to do the same thing? thats all it means.
I get the point, but it's a bad quote. Let me give you an example of a quote that is right on target.
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" -- Albert Einstein
Einstein captures the fact that you need to both add ("as possible") and keep simple. The original quote does not, although apparently some people have a preface to the quote that has a whole bunch of assumptions that make the quote work. I've never seen that preface.
Saint-Exupéry can't have meant it literally; nothing left to take away means zero. On the other hand, since zero is possible, you can make the same trivial argument against Einstein. I suspect that in both cases the original (con)text would be illuminating.
Edit: actually, it appears that Einstein never said this famous Einstein quote. According to Wikiquote, here is what he did say:
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
Hardly as catchy! But it does make explicit the qualifier -- without surrendering adequacy -- that applies equally to Saint-Exupéry as well.
The point seems to be that creation is a process that is first additive, then subtractive. Mere agglutination is inferior.
Most people realize exactly what the quote is talking about, since the alternative (removing stuff until you're left with nothing, or with something barely working) makes no sense if the goal is perfection. Part of the appeal of the quote is that you have to make this realization. Just like a joke would lose its appeal if it was preceded by a list of assumptions that would explain the joke.
The problem is that what you describe is not the alternative I've heard before. It's not that you'd remove things to nothing, but rather that you don't add something that is necessary or beneficial, because there's this belief that adding things is bad. I hear this from a lot of college grads, who apparently read a blog that talks about this, or maybe read this quote.
My point is you don't add stupid stuff, but you don't blindly say not to add something, and simply look for things to remove.
I guess I just never met anybody who didn't understand the quote. To me it says: Think very hard about what to add, and think very hard about what to remove. Of course, I realize that those who take the quote literally are not going to think very hard about which features to remove, and I'll agree that you're more likely to succeed with a product that has lots of thoughtlessly added features, than one that has none. :)
It was Pascal who said that in one of his Provincial Letters. The quote is often misattributed to Mark Twain, Cicero, and others, but I've never seen it ascribed to Lincoln. Out of curiosity, do you remember where you heard that?
In other words "the key to perfection is to take a perfect item and remove things that cause it to no longer be perfect". Clearly I'm the only person who thinks this is just flat out dumb. Why would you ever say that to someone except to irk them?
That's like saying the key to being correct is to take your correct statement and not put the word "not" in front of it.
So yes, if you have perfection, actions that lead away from it are problematic. I find it idiotic that this would bear repeating, but I guess I have a low threshold for this type of thing.
The problem I have with the quote is that it makes me think he took away too many words. To make the quote perfect, he needs to add some words. And maybe he realized that too, but would be a hypocrite if he did so. :-)
I'm a big fan of bull pen type environments, where it's wide open spaces and everyone is together with no walls between.
If you have that, and also offer a few "quiet rooms" where you can go if things are loud or you need to check your personal email, I don't see what the problem is.