Founders at Work.pdf

Philip Greenspun 323
let you do the same thing. Why would anybody pay for this? But they were
selling it. They had hundreds of millions of dollars from their IPO, and we
thought, “These companies can’t just waste all their money forever.”
Microsoft was another concern. But they also were very, very slow. They
finally today have a product called SharePoint, which is somewhat similar to the
ArsDigita Community System.
One thing that we did which enabled us to be much, much faster than our
competitors was that we developed on and released our software from running
real-world systems. For example, we would install our release of software on
photo.net or on the ArsDigita.com site where the employees and customers
were all using it. We picked one site which was a public, well-used website, and
we put all our new features on there. If there was a page that was very slow
because the SQL query hadn’t been tuned properly, we would find out immediately.
If there was a user interface that was clumsy and confused the customers,
say on the photo.net classifieds, well, 100 classified ads were being
posted every day and people would email us saying, “We can’t figure this out.”
So we would get immediate feedback, and we could fix it.
Then, after a couple weeks of testing the new release on this running
service, we would just tar it up in the UNIX file system and produce a distribution,
and that was it. We couldn’t guarantee that this toolkit would solve all the
world’s problems, but we could guarantee, at least for something sort of like
photo.net on a medium-sized server with a few hundred thousand registered
users, that the software would be adequate in performance and adequate in
features. It wouldn’t be too expensive to support administratively because the
user interface wasn’t confusing people.
By contrast, companies like Microsoft were still developing software for the
Web as if the Web didn’t exist.
Livingston: What does that mean?
Greenspun: Let’s say you have a word processor. You send a marketing person
out to interview people and find out what features they need. Then they take
that back to the product manager. The product manager writes up some specs:
here are the features we’re going to have in the next release. Then they send
that to the programmers, who are in a vacuum, who build this thing according
to the product manager’s specs. When they’re done, it goes to QA, but it’s not a
real running system—they’re not really trying to write documents; they’re just
QA people. Then eventually they burn a disk with the latest release of
Microsoft Word, and they mail it out to all the world’s lawyers, writers, students,
and whoever else uses Microsoft Word.
That works pretty well for word processors because it’s a product that was
developed in the ’60s by IBM, and people are pretty sure of what the minimum
features should be in a word processor. It also works pretty well because people
don’t demand frequent upgrades. There aren’t new requirements and new ideas
coming out in word processors, so if you have a release every three years, that’s
just fine. It doesn’t hurt that Microsoft has a monopoly and there’s no competition,
so if it takes them 4 years instead of 3, it doesn’t make any difference.