Joel's rant, aside from the last paragraph ranting on salary, seems to be focusing on "clouds" and synchronization. A friend of mine, a citizen of Mexico, bought an AirMac with a solid-state drive just so he could travel into the USA without fear of anything being found on his drive: he pulls everything that he needs out of .Mac and wipes the drive before crossing the border.

Myself, if I ever start traveling internationally, I'll probably clean out the things that I don't want TSA people looking at, PGP the things that I consider trade secrets, and create a mostly empty "public" login to show them that I'm a clean, upstanding, citizen. Meanwhile I plot the downfall and subjugation of the world for the Free Republic of Mars! :hehe:

I am not a fan of clouds, I want to be in control of my data. I maintain backups, though I'm no longer doing off-site backups. All I need to do that is buy another 500gig external HD and have my wife drop it off at the observatory when she goes to work. I'm not terribly concerned with Yahoo and Google looking at my email accounts, because I don't do anything particularly noteworthy. That does not mean that I want my life to be an open book to be examined by the government or anyone else: anything that I want to be private I PGP and use encrypted email for with keys exchanged with a very select few.

But I'm ranting about clouds and privacy, which is not what the editorial is about.

Undeniably, Joel is right: Google & MS can afford to offer high salaries to top grads. He's also right that they have no real-world experience. Both companies have to make the appearance of hiring top talent, they have to answer to the Board of Directors which answer to the share holders. They have to try to maintain continuous growth, which is not possible in the long run, but they have to try: Wall Street will have it no other way. Both companies currently have the resources to do that, but will it last forever? I doubt it. I think Google's stock is tremendously overvalued and is going to hit a reality check speed bump in the not-too-distant future.

Google & MS can out-bid for top programmers. But there's plenty of skilled programmers still available, along with many tops who, as Our Beloved Editor and others have pointed out, don't want to move to Redmond or work for one of these companies, they have other motivations rather than just top dollar.

Joel, like many bloggers and editorial writers is frequently amusing, frequently insightful, and frequently just bloviating, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

(sounds to me like he got sniped at the last minute like an eBay auction when he was trying to hire someone)