The proposal has the potential to support pooling of multiple feeds. For example, you can get the updates of thousands of feeds in one request. That saves a lot of bandwidth and processing time. Does that make sense?
I think the author is confused with three different concepts: fault tolerant system, idea generation and agile development.
A system being fault tolerant, like googke, just means that it can rollforward/rollback when an error occurs. It is nothing more than a technical concept.
People in design industry often use brainstorming to generate and screen ideas. IDEO is just one of them. Brainstorming is not an explaination of either how they succeed or why they succeed.
And the framework Ruby on Rails characterizing convention over configuration and don't repeat yourself even has nothing to do with "failure-tolerance", thought it emphasizes fast iteration in development.
The over generalization in the article make its conclusion very unconvincing.
This is a very informative story. I'd like to give it a summarization so that the rest of us would not go into the same trouble.
1. Keep a very keen eye on your customers and selling. Mr. Baumeister sold high-end products. With economic downturn, fewer people spend money on luxueries. He should predict that when economic was going down.
2. Pay constant attention to cash flow and balance statement.
3. As a startup, don't outsource critical component. If you have to, always double check it. Seems the incompetent accounting firm played a significant role in failure of his business.
Hierarchy is generally a poor way to organize things, unless you happen to need to fill space (which is how nature uses it). If you arrive at hierarchy as a solution to a problem, you have most likely misunderstood your problem.
Most of organizations in our society have hierarchical structure. The goverment, military, academic, enterprise show you the hierarchical traits in position titles. The pyramid is necessary for managing responsibilities and decision making. Social stratification is normal to all societies to some extend.
> The pyramid is necessary for managing responsibilities and decision making.
It's actually one way of making decisions and managing responsibilities. It's likely the most common because it evolved from the manufacturing-era model (think Henry Ford making cars). Ford's model evolved from looking at the military.
Ford has a famous line - “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”
It's possible that a pair of hands that took direction would be ideal in Ford's system (though I doubt it - Honda's done much better by actually harnessing the brains connected with the pairs of hands). But that hierarchical model is counterproductive in today's knowledge and networked economy: you want to use the resources and knowledge at all levels of your company, and that way you do that is by decentralizing authority and decision-making power to the edges.
Look at the open-source model of building software; it's pretty damn far from hierarchical, and it's at least as successful at creating value compared with the more hierarchical model most software companies use.
No doubts that open source model creates vast value to software industry, but that model is distributed only in terms of the big picture. If you look at a specific open source project, it's probably still organized in a hierarchical way. It still needs a leader to do the high level design and decide direction. New commers still need to climb the ladder - by contributing to the project - to a point before they can significantly affect the project.
But the hierarchy is broken by the ability of one node, err, person, to participate in multiple hierarchies at once at varying levels. This turns it into more of a graph of relationships with hierarchical elements, and while it's true you can't understand that without understanding hierarchies it is equally true that you can't understand the dynamics if you only characterize it as a hierarchy.
One way of expressing America's still-unusual social flexibility is that we have many valid social structures and it is very easy to move between them; there have even been some studies on how that works. Contrast this with the other extreme of "grow up in your home small town and never leave", for instance, where there does develop a fairly strict universal hierarchy.
Glad we've finally cleared up the function of that space filling matter.
Aristotle asserted that the brain's function was to cool the blood. Later, it was asserted that it was responsible for cognitive facilities. And now, finally, we realize that its job is to fill the space in between one's ear ...
With a fixed amount of money, people tend to invest less money to risky business. People without past success are more risky. They just follow the common sense.
