Have you ever considered that Valve is successful because of open allocation? It's not like this massive cashflow was conferred upon them by God.
That success exists because they're doing things right.
If you look at closed-allocation software companies that succeed, what you find is that a politically fortunate subset does exist on essentially open-allocation terms. They work on what they want, where they want, aren't penalized for creative output, and get shit done. That small percentage ends up driving the whole company. That being the case, why not improve the odds by giving more people (or, even, all the engineers) that freedom?
Google and Microsoft also have massive free cashflow and they don't use open allocation.
Microsoft has been in decline for 15 years and a large part of that is stack-ranking, which goes hand-in-hand with closed allocation.
Google is doing OK, but it's in cultural decline and has been since the ~2009 introduction of more traditional management... which is around when Google's engineering organization became more rigidly closed. (From 2002-2007, Google was somewhere between open and closed allocation, solidly mid-spectrum because it was engineer-driven.)
> Have you ever considered that Valve is successful because of open allocation? It's not like this massive cashflow was conferred upon them by God.
Have you considered that every company which stumbles into a network-effects monopoly is successful regardless of how they run the place? "Conferred by lucky timing" is still an exogenous cause. We've learnt from the Windows and mobile App Stores that you can wind up in this position with and without creative output penalties and management bullshit.
> Microsoft has been in decline for 15 years and a large part of that is stack-ranking, which goes hand-in-hand with closed allocation.
It's definitely declining. It's been declining for decades. This decline has taken the form of a business so profitable that 4 out of 5 divisions by themselves would qualify as Fortune 500 entries.
And Google has been drinking cash from the same river for its entire life. The only diversification from advertising revnue they have is mobile devices, and it's only because they bought Motorola outright.
If you own a gold mine, you make profits because the market demands gold. Not because you are good to your staff, or bad to your staff. What makes you successful is the ownership of the gold mine.
Like I said, you have (so far as I can tell) one and only one example of any seriousness. One data point does not uphold a theory which completely ignores that economics is the subject of satisfying unlimited wants with limited means in the face of unlimited arrangements.
That success exists because they're doing things right.
If you look at closed-allocation software companies that succeed, what you find is that a politically fortunate subset does exist on essentially open-allocation terms. They work on what they want, where they want, aren't penalized for creative output, and get shit done. That small percentage ends up driving the whole company. That being the case, why not improve the odds by giving more people (or, even, all the engineers) that freedom?
Google and Microsoft also have massive free cashflow and they don't use open allocation.
Microsoft has been in decline for 15 years and a large part of that is stack-ranking, which goes hand-in-hand with closed allocation.
Google is doing OK, but it's in cultural decline and has been since the ~2009 introduction of more traditional management... which is around when Google's engineering organization became more rigidly closed. (From 2002-2007, Google was somewhere between open and closed allocation, solidly mid-spectrum because it was engineer-driven.)