Founders at Work.pdf

322 Founders at Work
Livingston: Did a lot of people not have resources to implement your ideas at
the time, because the Web was still emerging?
Greenspun: People used to say, “Why should we pay you guys $30,000 to
$50,000 a month to do this thing, when we can just hire our own programmer?”
What I would tell them is, “Each company has one class of stars. In some companies
maybe it’s the salespeople, and in some companies maybe it’s the
mechanical engineers. There’s going to be one class of people for whom it’s
really easy to hire more people like that.” Hospitals are a good example. If it’s a
good hospital, the doctors will be good, and it’s very easy for them to hire good
doctors. But it’s hard for them to hire any other kind of person. Hospitals don’t
have really good advertising people; those people want to work on Madison
Avenue.
So we would say, “You’re a very capable person, and you’re going to have a
very easy time hiring people like yourself. We don’t know your business and
we’d have a hard time hiring someone like you, but we have a very easy time
hiring someone like me, who’s an MIT-trained computer science nerd. It’s
cheaper for you to use us, because we have really great programmers, and great
programmers are a lot cheaper than mediocre programmers. So even if you
give us a profit margin, it’s still cheaper than doing it internally.”
That might not have been true for SAP actually. SAP was a user of our software.
They had a lot of good programmers, so they weren’t a customer; they
just used the software without needing us.
Livingston: Tell me a little about the competitive landscape.
Greenspun: There was Broadvision. Believe it or not, people didn’t agree back
then on how you did websites. Today, everybody would pretty much agree that
the right thing to do is to do whatever Bill Gates or Microsoft says. So you
download SQL Server, Visual Studio .NET, and you have a two-tiered system
where you have a data model and SQL Server and you have scripts and a scripting
language talking to the database. You don’t have a lot of elaborate compilation
steps. If you change a script, it’s written in C# or Visual Basic; the next time
you load it, a new definition will be evaluated. Very lightweight programming
environment. Most of the engineering is in the database.
That’s how I started doing things in 1994, but there were lots of companies
trying to convince people that that wasn’t adequate; that you had to have something
really complicated. They would say, “What you really need is lots of layers
and application servers and you need our software. You don’t just download
Perl and Apache. You have to buy our system for a million dollars.” Broadvision
was almost comically difficult to use. It required people to program their web
pages in the C++ language, which even a lot of professional programmers find
impossible to use. Modifying a website became just as expensive and difficult as
it would be to make a change to Microsoft Word, and Microsoft itself is only
able to get out a new version every few years.
There was also a company called Vignette, and they had a really bad product.
They had a product that let you program web pages in Tcl, which was a
scripting language. But there were free open source tools that were better and