Well I guess you'd have to take that up with Mike as you're really referencing his opinion not mine. In that instance I was neither trying to praise or criticise the kind of company structure that appears to be represented by Valve/GitHub (if "open allocation" better describes this phenomenon then I'll take your word for that). In fact I only mentioned it because it was the context within which my discussion of Atlassian's culture began on the evening in question.
I personally find this open allocation concept quite fascinating and think it potentially holds a lot promise. Most people working in corporate environments today would be lying if they said there wasn't huge room for innovation and efficiency gains at their workplace. To my knowledge however, I am unaware of any situation where an open allocation culture has been successfully retro-fitted to an existing corporate environment (if you know of one, I'd be interested). I'm also skeptical in relation to how well an open allocation culture would work out once a company grows beyond a certain inflection point. I'm not well read enough on this matter to put a stake in the ground and define that exact inflection point. But for the sake of illustration, let's say I'd be interested to know how such a culture would work out when applied to an organization consisting of thousands of employees as opposed to dozens or even hundreds.