A friend wrote the following on Facebook regarding Yahoo's new work at home policy linking to this article:

I can get on board with the idea that effective communication and close collaboration can stimulate innovation, but this line I would have stricken from the memo: "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home". Couldn't disagree more. If that's the case, you are hiring the wrong people.

Now, I would agree with the part about it being "the wrong people".

I think it's both an interesting and telling move on Ms. Mayer's part. I suspect reading between the lines she found a very dysfunctional corporate culture after joining Yahoo following a parade of CEO's over the last several years she wants/needs to break. Those who can't deal will leave, they should have left on their own accord long before now. Taking this view the move could easily cull the ranks of those silently dissenting employees without the need for a dreaded RIF. Some good people may leave too though if they buy Marissa's vision they'd likely find a way to make it work. Right or wrong I respect and admire her initiative to make a difficult decision.

Kudos.

Having worked for large companies (UNUM, Borland & Microsoft) I can easily see and appreciate how this sort of move can set a new tone throughout the organization. Small organizations use working from home as an incentive to attract and retain talent whereas I believe large companies can draw much more on culture to attract people to the office every day. That's exactly how I felt working at Borland (though not at MSFT). While at Borland I felt if I wasn't in the office I was truly missing something as did all of my collegues and I imagine that's the sort of culture Marissa seeks to rebuild at Yahoo. I would guess over the years at least some Yahoo employees lost the passion during the CEO parade, an unfortunate similarity to Borland.

I'm certainly not ruling out culture at small startup-centric companies particularly those where the employees all work out of the same office but I think for many passion is three fold, 1) the idea, 2) belief in the product and 3) the team all of which played a roll for me at Borland making Delphi a small startup within a large organization.

Btw, I'm no longer a Yahoo user though I look forward to seeing what Marissa can do at Yahoo and wish her luck.

A friend pointed me to the release of TypeScript and the video where Anders Hejsberg provided an explanation and multiple examples of Microsoft’s latest efforts to improve JavaScript development. For me personally the video is a real throwback to the days attending team meetings at Borland where Anders would demo Delphi language features. In fact, there’s an interesting parallel between TypeScript and Delphi where both require proprietary interface files to call functions in external modules with the same issues of getting these files generated/updated.

I’ve been working in the OS world for the last few years now and I’m left scratching my head wondering where this effort is going? It places huge emphasis on Intellisense and error insight features yet ignores how one might approach actually debugging all this beautifully unfamiliar generated code. Throughout the video I kept asking “Why wouldn’t they simply offer their own Dart-like alternative?”

While it “feels” fun and has the ususal Anders demo props going for it seeing a compiler infer types simply isn’t as exciting as it was the first go-round and the lack of a debug session demo left me feeling rather hollow. Had MS released an updated IE natively supporting TypeScript… but no we’re not back in IE 3 days, that ship has sailed.

Perhaps it’s an Enterprise play to help those lowly Enterprise developers conquer JavaScript in a way that’s more palatable by management? Ah, I don’t think so as it’s all interestingly packed as Open Source.

Don’t get me wrong I appreciate type safety as much as the next compiler fan and in many ways I long for those good ol’ type safe days but I’m pretty skeptical that this is the right path forward.

With Apple’s recently announced changes to it’s License Agreement I really don’t see any surprise in it at all. My computing career started on an Apple II in high school but that was the extent of my exposure to Apple hardware and software until I won an iPod back in my Borland days. I followed with some interest what seemed to be the near death of Apple back in the Gil Amelio days and the curious flirtation with 3rd party hardware manufacturers which was subsequently crushed.

If anything Apple has always fiercely protected what makes it Apple. They’re an incredibly innovative company and while I’ve heard and read people talking about these recent changes being reminiscent of Mac vs. Windows I’d disagree. There are some significant differences this time around particularly when you consider Apple’s control over and influence on content producers, something that didn’t exist “back in the day”. This time around Apple arguably has the best device, and I’m a big Android fan but it’s plainly missing tons of polish that the iPhone has in spades.

With the recent release of the iPad and all the magazines and newspapers scrambling to leverage it to salvage their fading print business once again Apple is in the drivers seat. If you look at the landscape Apple has lots of things going for it right now on the content side. Take for example the fact the Droid has a non-existent music experience and that their online Market is rather laughable when compared to the AppStore. No matter how lame iTunes is we’ve all had it for years and got sucked into it well before the iPhone came out with an iPod or two (or three). Also, if you’ve watched Apple’s iPhone announcements over the years they’ve always highlighted gaming. There's been no shortage of games produced for the platform and I’d guess the vast majority of those wouldn’t really have issues when it comes to the recent license agreement changes (though that’s just a guess). Now with the advent of the iPad with all it’s hype we’re going to see an explosion of cool games that do all sorts of new things and the movie, magazine, book and newspaper reading experience will all now have to live up to Apple’s standard which is going to be very difficult to do. In other words I don’t think it’s going to slow the growth of the AppStore any time soon which gets right to my point…

Apple is going to, rightly, protect its business and the experience of using their devices is damn enjoyable and very fluid, far more so than on Android. It’s easy to understand they wouldn’t want a game, or any application, to play/function exactly the same on any other platform. It’s also easy to see after years of cultivating their “relationship” with the music industry there’s probably no company better positioned to negotiate rights to movies, magazines, newspapers or other multi-media content particularly now they have a larger screen device all those parties surely want to be on.

One way to look at this is that developers are getting screwed though I think that’s perhaps short sighted if your goal as a developer is for the platform that you’re targeting to succeed for years to come. Apple is working to protect their platform and with iAd, if anything, they’re looking to expand not only their revenue but their developer community’s as well. Makes sense.

When I step back and look at it, Apple’s been cultivating all kinds of relationships using their mobile devices with developer’s, non-Mac users, music enthusiasts, gamers and entire industries. They’ve created an experience, whether it’s in the Apple store or on the AppStore or on a mobile device that’s difficult to top and I’m hard pressed to think of another company in a similar position. At least Kliener Perkins seems to agree.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on the subject. What’s your take?