I was going to reply the same exact thing. There are probably 17 dipshits in the world who are "brogrammers" and now the rest of us have to hear about them all the time like it's an epidemic. Dumb.
I used to have a boss who would tell me how I had the power to do anything, to change the world, with my magical software-writing abilities. He didn't understand why I wasn't out starting my own business, with no one to tell me what to do. But there is always someone to tell you what to do. Whether it's your employer or your customer (and even that distinction is dubious), whoever has the money makes the rules.
I just get tired of people's laziness and lack of attention to detail. Not because I'm a perfectionist, because it causes problems. It often falls to me to figure out how exactly someone else fucked up. It gets old.
Taking a photo is a creative endeavor, not necessarily an effort to flawlessly recreate how something actually appears to the human eye. Engineers frequently do not get this.
I don't think Google is on a good path right now, but I would majorly hesitate to compare them to Yahoo. Yahoo has dawdled for years with no clear vision of what the hell they are doing. In fact, you could argue that Page's current strategy is a play against turning out like Yahoo. It's a pretty clear vision, even if I don't like it, and it's certainly product-oriented. They're focusing on one product and streamlining all the random crap they used to do just for the hell of it.
I don't know what will happen with Google, but I don't see Yahoo's fate in their future.
Wait, Android boosters always point out that it was around before the iPhone's release. Now we're saying it was created to keep Apple from controlling the mobile industry? Hmmmmmmm.
Well, I guess that is pretty much what I'm thinking. The barrier to entry is low, but that just means the barrier to having your userbase taken by Groupon or LivingSocial is equally low.
Strange that there is still so much daily-deal stuff being worked on. Is this really fertile ground for a business? (Honest question.) Is everyone still reacting to the Groupon IPO, even though that business has all sorts of smells?
Interesting - this article blames Amazon, another blamed the iPad squeezing BB's margins. I say the blame lies with the clueless way these stores have been run for years. thehigherlife's anecdote about trying to buy a cable is a good example. Consider the insane irony of the name "Best Buy" in the context of that story.
I guess I always thought it was a fool's errand to contribute to some company's corpus of knowledge which they will surely sell or profit from, and the only reward is an integer somewhere gets incremented. But it turns out the content on StackOverflow is licensed to the community in some way. So, I don't really have an excuse anymore.