Yes, but in startups, being a PM is often very hard, because no one has to listen to you. So you need to bring your own credibility and influence so the product gets done properly.
Love it, but it has one problem. Your argument is basically that it's a free market.
So, assuming the market is bad and jobs are hard to find, is it then ok to work nights and weekends like the article describes? Or should there be some kind of limit to "slavery"?
On one hand, as a hacker myself, I like the idea. It's as free-form as possible. Which is exactly the right spirit of hacking: no forms to fill out, no rules and procedures.
On the other hand, they are bound to end up with thousands of weird requests. Sorting through those will be a lot of work, in order to find a handful of gems, I'm afraid.
But I hope it works out for them and trickles down to the entire hacker community.
Actually, it had two huge benefits: a lock-in for early adopters, and it is memorable. Don't discount the second benefit. Once enough early adopters talk about it, the general public will come to remember the name. This is extremely important for a consumer product.
By the way, technically if the text of your home page has not changed since you wrote it in 2008, it would be illegal for you to claim a copyright year of 2009.
Why? Because the date serves a purpose: so that people can know when your copyright expires and your content falls into the public domain. If you move up the date incorrectly, you are cheating the rest of the world.
As you can imagine, we are not that eager to copy your home page for free 75 years from now, but the law doesn't care.
That's why I'm so impressed with NPR. Its depth of analysis is amazing compared to most other media I'm aware of in the US. And still. I still don't feel like paying for it.
I use NPR as a counter-argument to saying that good content will find a way to make lots of money. Show me how because I don't see it.
Excellent article worth reading. It will make you rethink how superior bloggers are to mainstream media, and whether mainstream media deserves to die or not.
Personally, I still believe that investigative journalism has a lot of value, but no way to charge top dollars for that value.
Intel for instance has a very well organized promotion track for purely technical roles (principal engineer and Intel Fellow if you go far enough). Many companies do not have such deep respect for engineering and management often becomes the only way up.
A touchscreen PC with no keyboard is extremely limited
I don't know about you, but when I browse the web, I actually don't type that much.
Mike Arrington was specifically referring to the need to browse the web from his couch. In browsing mode, you like to explore and click. Type? Not so much.
And intensive use of my iPhone has shown me that the screen is just a bit too small to seriously browse the web for more than 10 minutes at a time.
Mint's founder on virality (paraphrased): his product had essentially no virality (no one shares their bank stories with their friends) so he focused instead on good old PR: making sure he'd be in the news as much as he could.
The business plan contains more than the idea, it should contain the planned execution. For instance, how will you promote your product? Partnerships? Media campaigns?
Of course, the business plan is just a stack of paper. You may have brilliant execution on paper, but who knows if you will be able to pull it off.
Insert mandatory quote about military planning being necessary but not surviving the first contact with the enemy
The iPod is a great example of how Jobs was unique.
Sure, MP3 players existed before. The iPod had a very nice scrolling wheel. But it also had iTunes, meaning all the major labels had agreed to sell music online through that channel. Do you remember those times? Napster was scary for music labels. I'm sure it took serious negotiations to make the iPod/iTunes platform happen.
Geeks tend to make the usual mistake of breaking a platform into small pieces and argue that individually, each piece already existed. The scrollwheel? A program to synchronize your player? Etc...
That's missing the forest for the tree. Someone (Jobs) saw all these disparate pieces and had the vision to build a full, coherent, intuitive platform that solved a real problem and made the device a winner.
Until you understand the difference between a laundry list of features and a solution, you'll keep writing useless code :-)
That's the key restriction from Linus right there. He was talking about system-level code.
For everything else (application-level, frameworks, etc.), you need the abstractions that C++ provides.