Second: Google's meeting with Joel was put on YouTube, and Microsoft's was...off-the-record? I think this one speaks for itself.

And seriously how can anyone get any real work done with all those meetings all day long?

Going to meetings all day is considered their "real work".

I'm somewhat surprised that Google doesn't offer something like this already. They have more resources than Stack Overflow and organizing information is supposed to be their forte.

I work for a large (65000+ employees) telco company, and our in-house problem/solution reporting database is totally broken. The search function is crap (it's based on predefined keywords, not really on free text). It has a voting system, but the votes are not used to classify the quality of the problems/answers. They are only used to track how active an engineer is browsing the database. You can randomly select problems and write nonsense commnents, the net effect is the same.

With a corporate Stack Overflow there would be no employee/boss conflict, since in my company all the users on a given domain are at the same hierarchy level.

When I discovered Stack Overflow I inmediately thought how good this would be to replace our corporate tool.

Overall, though, I would have liked to see a Stack Overflow inside some of the larger organizations I've worked at.

We're actually pushing into the corporate space with ErrorHelp-- but there's a lot less ego involved there (everyone runs into random unknown errors, really). Answers grow passively rather than being something people have to read each day to provide answers.

Story/tasks wouldn't decay with time, but only by being (1) finished; or (2) deprioritized with regard to others. Karma could be two-sided: points for proposing the right things, and (even more) points for actually implementing them.

(There'd be ways to estimate effort; split oversized items; claim/merge items to avoid redundancies; calculate community 'velocity' over time; etc.)

A few anchor project/community managers might have admin powers to pin certain overriding goals at top, or 'dead' digressions, or change the relative payoffs for proposing vs. doing, etc.

That is, what if a community much like HN compulsively hit 'reload' and earned karma not around ephemeral (often attention-abusing) 'news', but instead around incremental goals on a shared project?

Add the answer component and that would be it, no?

If I had my way, we'd throw away the current GWT implementation for a version that used unobtrusive JS and was a good netizen. Of course, if I had my way all the time, I'd also have a pony.

Microsoft also probably doesn't want employees to connect their personal devices the the guest WiFi -- very normal behavior.

The fact that Microsoft chose to conform with the letter of this law is to be expected; rather, the fact that Google's lawyers somehow decided they didn't have to do the same is surprising, at least to me.

Curious though, I glanced briefly at the wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_L... ) and it seems mostly about hardware needing to be CAPABLE of logging, not always logging already. Can you explain your first statement?

To limit exposure under common carrier safe harbor, and consequentially insurance premiums, most ISPs maintain only sparse activity logs and flush those on a periodic cycle.

These policies may also differ radically due to compliance with municipal and state laws (CALEA is federal) and/or private contractor facilities where "sensitive, classified, etc." work is undertaken.

To use an analogy, the phone company doesn't/can't record your conversations on a routine basis, merely the initiating and terminating routes. Still, they must have the "capability" of complying with a wiretap's mandates if called-on to do so. Don't get me started on the "warrant less wiretaps" fiasco.

I suspect that Microsoft could just as easily have an open WiFi network, but fine-grained policies go hand-in-hand with their corporate culture. Some would argue that Google's course-grained policies create their own set of problems. For a similar example, look at how hardware provisioning and technical support is done at both companies.

Of course, any paid access immediately associates a name with an IP: the person on the credit card used to charge the access.

On campus theres some Wifi network that is open and unrestricted. The public access one has a public portal (and vastly lower coverage in Mountain View last time I checked.)

Also, someone with Asperger syndrome might be sensitive to noise.

I want to dwell with them and be a part of their lives. I want to hear them bitch about their apps, their customers and vendors, their bosses, and each other. I want to know what they go through all day every day.

When I sit and suffer with them, the resulting software is always better. All the meetings, prototypes, demos, specs, etc., etc., etc. have never been able to deliver the same knowledge needed to develop their apps.

OTOH, I don't want to sit with other programmers, unless we're working on the same thing at the same time. I don't care about your problems, I have my own.

I sit in an office with a pretty fantastic programmer and I've certainly benefited from his knowledge, though I can certainly relate to "I don't care about your problems, I have my own."!

I've given my developers private offices. Each also has a notebook and there are many comfy seating areas. Most spend part of their day working in a social environment, and part working in the peace the 4 walls affords them.

On the other hand, interruptions seem worse than they do in a shared environment.

Are developers at Google as productive as they can be even sharing an office with 3 other people? Does it not matter if you are a certain caliber of programmer that shares an office with others of the same or similar caliber and level?

Perhaps those who work at Google have greater self-discipline and awareness to know when collaborating starts to cross the line into interrupting someone so the need for private offices is not as necessary as with other companies.

Ergo, if you are willing to move your "location" as often as you change tasks it's best to sit together.

Does "sit together" mean in an open environment or just in the same hallway within their own offices. I didn't think they specified here.

I don't think this has ever happened with Email or Usenet... but wow, imagine that. If Gmail could see which mailing list posts had been starred by other readers, it would save a ton of time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google&oldid=2...

Very unscrupulous on his side, I must add.

(speaking of Go Joe, that new GI Joe movie looks amazing. I can't believe it is 2 months away)