Courter point: The team here developed some interesting new mobile microscopy techniques. It's possible, had the project completed development, that some other cool things could have come from a "useless" tech-art project.
The creators of this project told me they actually wondered if PETA would take offense. Ideally, though, the tardigrades would have had plenty of algae and room to swim around/reproduce.
One big thing here is that Ara was part of ATAP which was acquired from Motorola (back when Google owned Motorola). So the culture of this project is an unusual one, even for Google. The heavy dependence on outside contractors probably made for a complicated setup, but I don't think that was the problem. From the outside, it feels like ATAP/Project Ara just ran the clock out. If they'd have gotten the phone done and ready to ship faster, maybe things would be different today.
To be clear, that line was something I imagined someone at Google saying prior to the developments mentioned in the article. But, "put an aquarium full of water bears in your phone"? That's a nonsense, fluff headline if I ever heard one. That they went so far as to actually do it, I will admit, redeems it somewhat! But not so much that I'll believe that the project had any goal beyond generating press. :D
Could have been more clear, but this is the reason in a nutshell "Since Chrome’s rise, Mozilla has hardly any weight to thrown around." Chrome is over 5 years old.
I've seen this idea work well in very young companies (2 to 10 employees). It can boost morale at that size, but it would likely feel forced beyond a handful of employees.
The term "startup" doesn't intrinsically say anything about a business other than that it's new. But the discussion about "startups" on HN and in the popular press assumes it means
1) long hours
2) a bunch of young guys
3) aiming at extremely rapid growth (often measured by users, regardless of revenue)
It's probably a losing battle trying to and change that use. If the shoe fits, call it a startup, otherwise just use consulting business, small-business, or whatever other term describes it. It's not like you're losing out on something by not calling a web development shop a startup.
Personally I think the term startup is overused. I regularly see simple premium membership sites paraded around as startups in all the startup news feeds.
I work for a small company (less than 20 people including contractors) that has been in business for 16 years. When I left my giant-ass defense contractor job to come here, a couple people there insisted on referring to it as a "startup". It is rapidly becoming a word that means whatever the speaker wants it to.
Point 1 is decidedly a part of American work ethic. Plenty of startups in Europe have sane work hours, for example. Admittedly, the amount of startups that recently became successful here can be counted on a single hand, but that doesn't invalidate the point.
No, but a startup is a company designed to grow into something much larger very quickly — that (historically) requires a massive amount of work. Small businesses can require 80 hours a week too, but they traditionally serve a much smaller segment of the population.
One thing that came up in the discussion was that Adobe wouldn't open source due to proprietary internal content.
However I replied this may or may not be true - Adobe has open-sourced several large projects. Flex (http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.html), for example is a big software product that Adobe switched to open source in 2007.
From an article back then:
"Ward outlined the transition as having the following steps:
Today - Creation of Mailing List for Discussion
Summer 2007 - Public Bug Database and Daily Builds
Second Half 2007 - Flex 3 Released
December 2007 - Read Only SVN Access, Patches Welcome
2008 - Committers with Write Access, Creation of Possible Subprojects "
Why would Adobe make Fireworks open source when they plan to continue selling and updating the last version?
"While we are not planning further feature development for Fireworks, we will continue to sell Fireworks CS6 as well as make it available as part of the Creative Cloud. We will provide security updates as necessary and may provide bug fixes. We plan to update Fireworks to support the next major releases of both Mac OS X and Windows."
