This time you get to read some interesting observations, picked up over the past few days from the news and from conversations. Not surprisingly, the post is littered with more links than usual.

1. To work from home or not

Marissa Mayer created ripples when she announced through an internal memo Yahoo’s decision to seriously discourage working from home. Industry bigwigs have not finished decrying the decision. However, there are some benefits to working at a central office, and these benefits are lost when working from home becomes the default. Chance encounters and conversations do have their value. Penelope Trunk’s blog has a post which provides views in support of Mayer’s stand.

Here’s my take on the idea of working from home: see what you and the team want to achieve in terms of innovative ideas, productive undisturbed work, personal time off and so on, and use working from home as one of many tools to attain a good mix of these goals. The important point to keep in mind is that in demanding jobs, especially those which are not 9 to 6 jobs, the company cannot say “you are responsible for the work, the company does not care about your personal time” because if a company draws out the best in you, it is obliged to help you find the best in yourself by helping you find space for personal life. In any case, companies must realize that the most motivated and best performing employees require flexibility simply so that they can continue performing well, as this article says.

2. The oath of the who???

The Oath of the Vayuputras. That’s what every cat and dog I know is reading these days. I’m curious but having very recently laid hands on Love in the Time of Cholera, there’s no way I’m jumping on the Amish Tripathi bandwagon now. The point here is what this book has achieved, and I don’t mean spreading the reading habit or developing English language skills.

Instead, what I’m referring to is the fact that many of my friends have pre-ordered online a book for the first time in their lives. Before The Oath, they had always carried out one of four options: bought pirated books on the roadside, bought books from Landmark and Crossword, ordered books from Flipkart, ordered ebooks online. Now for the first time, they have pre-ordered online a book, that too not an ebook. I think there is a shift in consumer behavior here.

3. Paying for email

A radical idea came along in an article by angel investor Esther Dyson in the Mint the other day – instead of free email and the consequent spam, get the sender to pay and the recipient to set the price for reading email. After all, each email requires the receiver’s attention, and I’d certainly be glad if there was a way I knew the sender was sufficiently invested in the matter to warrant my attention.

Regarding questions like how the pricing would work or the complexity of the system, I agree with the author: these are operational questions, they would get sorted out over time. When people are ready to pay for what they find valuable and/ or scarce, it makes ample sense for them to pay for someone’s attention. But then again, bring money into play and you risk bringing inequality where there was only inaccessibility.