Linked List: May 3, 2008

Saturday, 3 May 2008

NYT: Microsoft Withdraws Its Bid for Yahoo ★

Microsoft gracefully concedes. Surprising to me, given that reports yesterday claimed the two were close on a price. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to Yahoo’s stock price.

Pixar’s Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation ★

Great interview with Pixar’s Brad Bird:

You don’t play it safe — you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.

And, regarding Pixar’s headquarters:

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center — which initially drove us crazy — so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

(Via Kottke.)