Founders at Work.pdf

340 Founders at Work
So they suffered all these sales losses because the thing was late. They killed
demand for the old product by telling them the new product was “just around
the corner.” Then, when the new product finally came out, some critical pages
were literally a thousand times slower than the old system. So where you have
had a 1-processor pizza box server, you would now need a 64-processor, $2 million
server to serve the same user community. It had never been tested; it had
never been released on a running system like photo.net. It was just a bunch of
programmers—sitting in a vacuum and never dealing with a publisher or a
user—programming whatever they thought. They were all young because they
had gotten rid of some of the senior people.
The question-and-answer forum, which was one of the most heavily used
parts of the site, was literally a thousand times slower than on the old system.
As far as upgrades, they said, “We’re going to have this abstraction layer, and
you’ll never have to actually interact with the database; you’ll just talk to this
abstraction layer.” Sure enough, the first time people tried to build a real system
for a customer list, they found that the abstractions weren’t the right ones,
and they had to go underneath and deal directly with the database, which
immediately means that, if they ever had to upgrade that to a new version, they
would have all the same problems as the old system. So they didn’t solve the
main problem they said it would solve.
It wasn’t true J2EE, either. They said it was going to be J2EE, but they
didn’t like some of the commercial tools or the open source tools that were
available, so they built their own magic persistence layer. They built all their
own stuff, so customers who looked at it said, “This isn’t actually J2EE. It’s a
pile of Java crap, yes. It’s very complicated, yes. But it is not J2EE.” (To be
J2EE, it has to use these other components that are standard and distributed by
Sun or WebLogic.) So they failed to achieve any of their goals. The old system
took the average programmer about a week to install and figure out and customize
a bit. The new system was taking an experienced programmer 2 full
months to understand.
There were a lot of projects where people would have gotten there sooner if
they had just started with a raw Windows machine. Your competitor is always
Microsoft, so you have to look back and say, “What does Microsoft have? They
have Internet Information Server, Active Server Pages in Visual Basic, some
example code that they distribute. So would somebody get there faster if they
just got that and started from scratch?” And the answer compared to the new
ArsDigita toolkit was “Yes.”
Nobody wanted to use it. People would download it, but they would give
up. There was no adoption in the open source world. A handful of teams at
ArsDigita were installing the new system for customers, but it was taking them
forever. They were all running over time and over budget. They ended up with
a product that nobody wanted. At the end of the day, the programmers killed
the company—the junior programmers who were put in charge. The VCs and
the management team basically selected programmers according to who had an
agreeable personality. They picked people who were pretty junior, who didn’t
have much experience with real-world customer projects, and they basically