For a lot of articles like these, looking at the answers to see if they're interesting is futile. The real insight is in the questions. In this case, you can reflect on your own friendships, and how the other side of them might see them differently.
This is completely incomprehensible and very funny. It's also amusing how different this is to what Twitter has done. It seems incredibly unlikely that any consultants (overpriced or otherwise) were involved in Twitter's rebranding, whereas the Pepsi document seems like outsiders trying very earnestly to deliver to an executive they don't understand.
Not everyone writes with you in mind as their ideal reader. Some people write for themselves and publish to keep themselves honest, though I don't presume to know what OP's motives and goals are in this case.
"So it's ironic that, despite all these established old-media recommendation engines, there was nothing for one of my favourite media - online articles."
It's feels great to be able to blame managers when something goes wrong, but that's the only real difference between having or not having your 'accountability chain'. And if your company is structured to have someone to blame when things go wrong, you're not really building for success.
I get that everyone is afraid of prioritization going out the window without managers, but in my experience (and ymmv), managers are no better than productives at prioritizing. Grown-ups are used to taking responsibility.
You can add collaborators to private repos (ie people with push rights). You can have organizations with private repos and use the collaboration tools within the organization.
For me, the private repos are more about having them where I have my other code.
Not once does he say anything about independence or labels. He just says that the focus needs to be on shipping, everything else is secondary.
There's nothing "out of touch" about that. It's completely, and trivially, true. If you want to ship, ship. Don't tweet that you're half-finished writing a lyric for a song you have the opening riff to. Ship it.
Bilingual here (so this is anecdotal). When I'm immersed in the different lingual environments I notice fairly substantive differences in my identity. It's not stuff that's necessarily very apparent to bystanders (as far as I can tell).
The differences aren't necessarily as sweeping as 'world view'. I don't change political preferences by changing language.
I've recently ditched paper in favor of org-mode. It took about 3 months of using org-mode before I was comfortable enough to consider using it for my task items. Even then I needed to wait until org-mode was more embedded in my daily workflow than going through my stack of paper notes.
I think part of the problem with other task apps is that they try to be really good at one thing; organizing tasks. The problem with this is that you want to spend as little time as possible organizing tasks, which means the apps marginalize themselves by nature. You don't get enough time to learn how to use them, you forget to check in, you keep stuff in your head, etc.
For me, org-mode worked because I spend a lot of time organizing things other than tasks in it. But if I wasn't already familiar with it, I'd be spending too much time trying to figure out how to use it and I'd probably forget to check it.
The problem generalizes to this: organizing tasks is not a generic problem. The problem is highly informed by your life. Paper works because you can do whatever you want with it. It only looks like people using paper are using the same system. They're probably not.
Surely it's not about who does your R&D so much as what they produce?
Most of the MS R&D papers I've read have been very good, with excellent ideas. Let's also not forget that GHC is maintained at MS R&D.
The problem lies in converting research into product. One example is the data mountain[1]. The data mountain was way before its time (3d desktop in '98, which is still struggling to make inroads), it's a bad interface for a mouse-driven UI, but a good one for a touch-driven UI (probably not on a phone, but maybe on a tablet and definitely on a 20" or larger screen). But they haven't done anything with it.
I don't think the right stuff from MS R&D is transported to the product development people, which is sad, but highlights one of the differences between Google and MS. At Google a lot of research papers are driven by actual solutions (cf. BigTable, GFS etc). At MS there's more 'pure' research going on and as a consequence the divide between the research people and the product people is larger.
That's what it looks like to me anyway. I don't think there's any problem with the quality of the research being done at MS, quite the contrary.
There are some very powerful commandlets (basically scripts) for control over various pieces of MicroSoft infrastructure components (Exchange, Active Directory and more). Having access to these commandlets on my favored environment would be useful. I wouldn't even need to be running a PowerShell session to run them, but that would occasionally be nice too (there is something to be said for object pipes).