A company wouldn't. I posit that individual middle managers are the problem: whilst they do want the people working for them to be productive, they often subconsciously act to make sure they have the supposed "status" and that this comes (unknowingly, to them) at a cost.
Interesting, but I think that comfort speaks to a different issue. The office culture then is indirectly creating an environment that pressures you to act in a certain way and not acknowledging individual preference.
I agree that both is the way to go. You can find a study backing up either approach because they are important in different ways for different people.
I'm surprised no one has really brought up the introversion vs. extroversion angle. I just read Susan Cain's Quiet, and feel a wealth of clarity re: our general cultural stereotype that extroversion is better and therefore, so must be environments that are conducive to it (e.g., open floor plan. I don't have any illusions that corporations do that to save money, $ has never been a concern).
I work at a huge startup (300 people) that still has a very open floor plan and I basically work outside when it's not raining so that I can concentrate better. But the woman sitting next to me thrives in the activity and she can't work anywhere else.
I'm glad that the culture allows us to take freedom and ownership in how we channel our own productivity.
Agreed, I intensely dislike having my back to a room (including in places such as restaurants), and this was always my explanation, too.
(Actually, the explanation I give to people is that I'm terrified of assassination attempts, which is related from a scientific point of view but has the bonus of making my life sound much more exciting than it is.)
For what it's worth, I read their comment as meaning that some things we desire are the same throughout our lifetimes. In the same way that teenagers want to decorate their rooms to reflect themselves, as adults we have the same drives (though maybe with fewer posters of slightly-shameful bands).
I think that the problem is that "user-hateful" is the opposite of what's actually happening here: we're still at a state where security is something that users don't actually like, because it often puts the burden directly on them. Viewed cynically, what's happened here is that we have received "the software that we deserve".
Oh man. The shot of nostalgia brought on by this brought me almost to tears. I had them all, Geocities, Tripod... Saturday mornings hooked in to ftp.idsoftware.com at 33.6k and hand-crafting updates to my sites in notepad.exe (using uppercase tags, naturally).
It's ridiculous... the web is a much better place, technologically, nowadays, but something for me has been lost. As the author alluded to at the end of the article, it's all frameworks and abstractions. It's high gloss and low content. Bah.
Impressive, and interesting, but with one problem: I, like a lot of people, have floaters in my eyes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floaters). When I focus on a single point and don't move my eyes around, they tend to congregate at the centre of my vision and in Spritz's case block the words that are being shown.
Potentially, a brief pause every 50 words or so would make sense in order to quickly move my eyes and unblock my vision, though obviously at the cost of some words per minute.
Having had detached retinas that were caught early and tacked back in place by a laser I too have a heavy dose of floaters from blood leaking and clotting. It's more like drifting and jerking, variably transparent clouds than what people usually think of with point or wiggler floaters. What annoys me the most with this problem is their motion into and out of my foveal region in response to eyeball rotations and the resulting variation of tranparency. This especially bugs me while reading. Well, driving is worse but that's another topic.
What I immediately noticed with the Spritz demo was that since I wasn't moving my eyes there was no particular change in transparency in the foveal region once the little beasts settled into place. I found this a much improved situation which indicates that it is not the partial occlusion itself that bothers me but rather the constant changes in it due to moving my eyes about the page.
In brief, I like what this method does for my problem.
