sauravc

I thought this was a well written article and I loved the graphics (especially the one about 30 minute meetings actually taking 68 minutes). However, it's worth noting that this company is fairly small (48 members according to their About page) and that the group has been together for quite some time.

I'm not sure how well this would scale past the Dunbar number, or for organizations growing rapidly.

Either way, I'm glad they published this.

About time!

"People are born with an innate calling to drug dealing,"

What the hell is this author talking about? While the he's a pretty accomplished individual, he lost me with his shitty analogies based on false premises.

His article takes aim at these high-end ovens as well, and makes several proposals to make them even better.

I beg to differ. A better oven means tastier food at home, which pays dividends every single day of your life.

We're all reading these articles because we're excited about the future. In that context, the issues you've raised don't seem to be that big. Cost for the bill of materials will drop with mass production, and many of the major parts are already cheap.

After seeing personal computing and mobile computing revolutions unfold during my lifetime, I'm pretty sure the technical obstacles to making a reliable and cheap oven that Myhrvold describes are surmountable. Electric cars, jet planes and search engines deal with much harder engineering challenges.

Going from a simple millionaire to creating a company like Microsoft takes a lot of hard work to pull off.

But if you want to run with your line of reasoning then no one in the US really qualifies as self-made, from the point of view of let's say a poor person in India. We're all rich to someone who makes less than a dollar a day.

@augustl: We manage connections with curl and requests(python). We haven't seen any bottlenecks here yet, so we haven't thought to revisit it.

We do, however, use ZeroMQ for other stuff. But I'll always reach for HTTP for an API, unless there's a need to do otherwise. It's super simple to get running, interface and debug with. Every backend engineer knows how to use curl.