To me it looks like the biggest comparison is Apple TV (and Roku which I'm less familiar with). It's just an incremental version of the Apple TV for the Amazon ecosystem and to me that's the biggest disappointment. I would have much preferred that they go in the direction of incremental improvement over the Chromecast which would make this industry much more exciting in my opinion.
The primary use case of the power button is to power down the machine. Of all the times that the button is hit, how often is it hit with the intent of hitting the delete button? For me personally I would guess it's happened maybe once or twice in the couple of years I've had an Air.
So to me it seems like having to confirm that I want to shutdown after I hit the shutdown button, by either clicking or waiting, is a hurdle on the primary way the button is used. I can see that in the scenario posted that it is a "high impact" if you accidentally hit the power key, but overall the number of times that that happens must be low enough that bashing Apple's design decision has to be a little over the top.
How often do people use the power button versus accidentally hitting it? I'd say that my primary intentional use of that button is restarting the computer after hitting the button by mistake. Shutting down and powering up are rare activities for me.
Edit: waking from sleep rather than powering up - however it is often I restart I am doing as the wake from sleep is flakey for some reason.
The type of work that is being described is very typical of best of breed warehouse management systems. I agree that Amazon is a prop in this story as there a tons of other large scale companies that have the same types of systems. Maybe they don't all use temp workers, but labor management systems are not rare.
As somebody who currently lives in the Twin Cities I can vouch for both the upside and downside. So far this year the weather has been awful (we're about to get hit by a wintery mix for the next two days) but I think that's true for many places this year. The summers are shorter but beautiful. Spring and Autumn seem to be the shortest seasons. I personally love the Fall up here. Out-state weekends trips to the lakes are awesome as well.
When it comes to the cities themselves, just like anywhere else there are some spots that are better or more trendy than others. St. Paul is an older city but in a well maintained, charactery sort of way. Minneapolis is a small city, newer feeling, much cleaner than some of the bigger cities. Their are lots of small areas within each of the cities that are pretty popular. The suburbs are constantly being built out and are very convenient to the downtown areas.
There's a number of other great things about the area to help counterbalance the weather as well. The one thing that really gets me though is that NOBODY knows how to zipper-merge.
I'm generally a fan of 37 Signals and the way they treat their people. I also don't have any knowledge about any of this other than what I come across on the internet. My current company doesn't have a set WFH policy, it varies by department and sometimes seems hypocritical when you realize that there are overseas contractors. This is my disclaimer.
I disagree with this post. From everything that I understand from what I've read it seems like one of the major issues at Yahoo is a culture thing. This doesn't seem so much like a trust thing to me. It comes across to me as a way to rebuild an identity by changing the environment and you can't control the environment when people don't come in to the office.
It does seem to me like there is potential to lose some good employees up front, for sure. I don't assume this decision is a short term move. Whenever management makes a decision that is more restrictive, or against popular opinion, there is always out lash. Then it dies down. New people start and it's the only thing they know so it's not a big deal.
The people are going to be the ones who change the company, and to change their mindsets, and reinvigorate them it seems like a culture change would be a good thing in the long run. The current policy clearly isn't working, how bad could this really be?
I love the idea of working from home, being independent and working autonomously, but it has its place. It's situational at best and this might be the perfect example of a place where it's not currently working. This by no means is saying that it doesn't work for 37 Signals. It seems to work fantastically for them and for many of the customers who use their software. I loved Rework, and I'm definitely looking forward to Remote.
More than likely, given the option to buy an ebook for $x or a physical book with the addition of the ebook for 1.5*$x, I would probably spend the extra money for the option.
I can pretty well assure you that comcast customers deal with the same type of BS as time warner customers deal with having dealt with both. What surprises me is how different the level of service can be for the same provider in different regions. My experience with comcast in Minneapolis makes me want to frame my receipt from when I finally got rid of their service but I couldn't find anything bad to say about the service I received from comcast while I lived in Salt Lake City, not just the people but the reliability of my cable and internet as well as the superior software for the digital cable boxes and DVRs.
I wonder if it has anything to do with who they bought their infrastructure from when they moved into a market. For example, in my area Comcast took over from AT&T, and broadband immediately went from Not Available to Hell Yeah.
Maybe it's just me but I don't have any sympathy for these guys. I actually think The Social Network did more to sway my opinion of them than of Zuck.
What's the difference in $ value that they're trying to get? And is the difference between that and the money they originally settled on really worth the damage to their personal brand? They can't possibly be winning in the court of public opinion either right?
