[smoyer]

I have a hard time equating a lack of all organization with progress. It's true that many organizations have needless layers of management (and the associated interference), but what the article describes could most easily be replaced with four (or thirteen) individual sole-proprietorships.

And does the company's views on organization extend to the agile training they provide? Agile isn't disorganized or even unorganized, it just recognizes that you can't know everything/enough when you start. If they can't organize themselves well enough to avoid bankruptcy, can they organize a software project?

I think what they've done is an interesting social project, but by his own description, it seems like they've proved it doesn't work.

[mjn]

There's a somewhat different risk profile in these models than with a collection of a dozen sole proprietorships, though. Some ways better, some ways worse. I'm interested in a model along those lines myself, if I can find the right collection of people, as a way of trading away some upside gains (if I have a huge hit, we all benefit instead of just me) for some downside protection (as long as some subset of us is, on average, doing ok, we all can eat & pay rent).