[harryf]

To me the author seems to have linear view of productivity; that he seems to think time spent away from the keyboard is wasted time and worse still to waste that time communicating with your colleagues.

IMO the hidden goal of standups is to make sure a development team communicates, ideally face to face. Why? Because it's extremely valuable to shipping quality code / product etc. My experience has always been when standups over-run, the reason is there's some topic that needs discussing and preventing that discussion from taking place is usually a mistake.

Without standups, in a typical office environment with introverted personality types, communication doesn't happen. So in the end they're a compromise; perhaps not the best solution to the problem but good enough.