In this post from Valleywag:
At Google, executive chef Josef Desimone scrambled cruelty-free eggs by the truckload. Now Facebook has hired him to replace steam-heated trays of takeout with the kind of free food Googlers are used to. For engineers, Facebook is the new dreamland, and a company cafeteria is the kind of perk they’ve come to expect.(from: Facebook hires away Google’s top chef [Josef Desimone] )
Am I alone in feeling that this is a really ominous sign, it’s all gotten way out of whack, and is going to come crashing down?
Great products rarely come about through committee design. I’ve never seen it myself — behind every great product, there’s always been one or two obsessed people.
And it’s not enough just to be obsessed, you’ve got to be obsessed about details. Most people can’t or won’t get into the details.
From time to time, I send feedback to friends about their products and Web sites, some of it really really specific. One recent one was about date selection from a calendar: on a two-month-wide pop-up, they could have optimized the “end” date selection a bit better based on a chosen “start” date, when the start date was at or near a month boundary.
Are you rolling your eyes yet?
This is how great products happen, one little bit of obsessed detail at a time.