I've recently discovered an interesting way to create a new instance of an object in Google Guava and Project Lombok: Hide a constructor behind a static creator method. This means that instead of doing new HashBiMap(), you do HashBiMap.create().
My question is why? What advantage do you have of hiding the constructor? To me I see absolutely no advantage of doing this, and it seems to break basic object creation principles. Since the beggining you create an object with new Object(), not some Object.createMe() method. This almost seems like creating a method for the sake of creating a method.
What do you gain from doing this?