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.
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.
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.
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.
The point is that the censorship software is mandated in every sold PC in China. If it is so vulnerable and user's machine so eaisly to be taken control of, considering China's population, thounds and thounds PCs may be turned into hacking proxies.
The advices are very specific and concrete. If you actually run a startup, u will get the gist. You take care of your business while others take care of theirs. You can ask somebody for vision, but nobody can take action for you.