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A Sad Announcement

omniref.com

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Re: A Sad Announcement

#31

Post by Sanddancer »

timr wrote: post #12
gravypod wrote: post #7

This is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software, that you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and source control. I feel really bad for all the companies that have to jump through hoops to get their data rescued from this company. It also sucks to loose such a smart company. I wish they had built their solutions as a self hosted system so that people could still us…

"This is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software, that you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and source control." Omniref founder here. Please try not to think this way, particularly if you're a small team. I realize that this is kind of an impossible request (especially given the source), but one of the things that makes it immensely difficult to start a softwar…

Yes, because tools hosted elsewhere have the problem your shutdown is exemplifying. A definite expiration date /sucks/. Even if it is a month out, that means having to do a lot of retooling to pull out all the bits and pieces that have been built in that rely on the third party. Were it a hosted solution, a transition plan could be made that isn't a mad rush to make sure all the data that's in those annotations is saved once the lights go out.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#32

Post by Sanddancer »

This would have been a better project, and had probably gotten a lot more traction, had it provided plugins for the big editor suites -- eclipse, visual studio, etc. As the project stood, it's neat, but at the same time, it's an impedence mismatch. You can't just annotate in your environment of choice, you have to go into a browser window to view the same code you have open in another window and see if there are any annotations. There's a place for something like it, but it needs to be a lot more intimate with how people already work in order for it to get any sort of needed traction.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#33

Post by jpalomaki »

gravypod wrote: post #10
jzelinskie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why you see startups avoiding this model is because supporting self hosted solutions is extremely difficult as a small team and only impedes the ability to evolve your product. It's a shame, but companies shouldn't adopt products if they lack a feature requirement (data migration).

This is only the case for complicated deployment proceedures. One of my favorite pieces of software that I love updating is a project called GitBucket. It's a GitHub/BitBucket-esq site. It's simple to host and easy to use without much overhead. The deployment procedures go as follow: 1. Install JVM 8 2. Install GIT 3. Run If you aren't running a database it defaults to the internal one. All the defaults are sane. It…

All this quality control comes with a cost. If you for example start supporting external databases you probably need to support at least few of those to cover what customers are likely already running. For each database there's no single version that everybody is using, instead you have at least two versions running. 3 databases with 2 versions each means already 6 different combinations to test on. And not just the application logic, but the update procedures.

One big problem is that if something goes wrong in the customer side, debugging those issues is really time consuming. And things do go wrong. Most of the time you are probably solving issues that are not really your problems at all. Customer don't follow the installation instructions, the environment is not like it is supposed to be, customers tinker with things they are not supposed to tinker with. How do you handle this support in practise. Are your software engineers willing to spend the time on the phone, maybe with customers in different time zones. Do they have the administration expertise for those operating systems and databases the application supports so that they feel comfortable guiding customers over the phone.

Then there is the question that do you get good enough compensation for all this compared to just offering the SaaS solution. Just the additional hands-on support given to customer quickly eats your profits from the monthly fees charged from customer. All the time spend on creating installation and update procedures, testing those and giving support to customers is away from putting up new great features. On the other hand, being able to offer the on-site version can be of course a great competitive advantage.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#34

Post by timr »

Sanddancer wrote: post #32

This would have been a better project, and had probably gotten a lot more traction, had it provided plugins for the big editor suites -- eclipse, visual studio, etc. As the project stood, it's neat, but at the same time, it's an impedence mismatch. You can't just annotate in your environment of choice, you have to go into a browser window to view the same code you have open in another window and see if there are any…

Founder here. Yes, this is absolutely true. Problem is, one editor integration doesn't cut it. Or even two. The editor world is balkanized, and even targeting the "most common" tools wasn't enough. Early adopters are probably more varied in their editor use than the general developer population.

More importantly, that was just one feature in a pile of other "must have" features that people said they needed. It was on the roadmap, but we never got around to it.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#35

Post by timr »

pducks32 wrote: post #26
timr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. Founder here. I wasn't expecting this to be on HN (was kind of hoping for the opposite, actually; I'm not in a mental place where I can write a big, Medium-style, "why my startup failed" missive just yet), so I didn't go into any of this sort of stuff. The short answer to your question is that companies are bought, not sold. They may seem common, but acquihires are statistically pretty rare, and they usually come…

Hey, I don't know what kind of mental state you are in but I imagine your feeling pretty bummed so just wanted to say that I loved OmniRef and you made an incredible product. And though it's shutting down, you are successful. You did what very few people have the courage or ability to do: you started a company. So I can't wait to see what you do next. And I hope you can look back at OmniRef with good memories and kee…

Thanks, we really appreciate it.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#36

Post by timr »

wasd wrote: post #2

Would you consider open sourcing some of your work on Ruby analysis?

Unfortunately, the docs site code is...elaborate, and I don't think anyone could replicate the current site without a ton of effort from us. I don't see us open-sourcing that.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#37

Post by [deleted] »

Sanddancer wrote: post #31
timr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software, that you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and source control." Omniref founder here. Please try not to think this way, particularly if you're a small team. I realize that this is kind of an impossible request (especially given the source), but one of the things that makes it immensely difficult to start a softwar…

Yes, because tools hosted elsewhere have the problem your shutdown is exemplifying. A definite expiration date /sucks/. Even if it is a month out, that means having to do a lot of retooling to pull out all the bits and pieces that have been built in that rely on the third party. Were it a hosted solution, a transition plan could be made that isn't a mad rush to make sure all the data that's in those annotations is sa…

[deleted]

Re: A Sad Announcement

#38

Post by Frondo »

ianai wrote: post #30
dang wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok! Sorry for misreading you. I've put the comment back where it was.

Thank you. I felt pretty bad about coming off as being snarky.

dang, ianai, this is why I love HN.

Please keep up the good work forever.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#39

Post by sandGorgon »

timr wrote: post #13
ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

This is sad, and a bit perplexing. According to Crunchbase they had exactly 1 seed round ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omniref#/entity ) and their project provides a really nice feature for github which is better than githubs existing feature. So I'm perplexed why someone like Github doesn't acquihire them, give them a nice bonus for their work over the last couple of years and add their biological distin…

Hi. Founder here. I wasn't expecting this to be on HN (was kind of hoping for the opposite, actually; I'm not in a mental place where I can write a big, Medium-style, "why my startup failed" missive just yet), so I didn't go into any of this sort of stuff. The short answer to your question is that companies are bought, not sold. They may seem common, but acquihires are statistically pretty rare, and they usually come…

hmm... or repurpose it for lawyers.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#40

Post by discordianfish »

timr wrote: post #16
MaxLeiter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not opensource it? This way, your work won't go to waste, and maybe the community can continue it.

Open-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well. They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually. And in this kind of situation, you're committing to publicly maintaining the thing that you're trying to shut down. If there isn't enough interest at the start, it's just prolonging the pain of failure. It's better to rip the bandage off and move forward with your life.

While it would be great if you continue to maintain it, just releasing it and not supporting it any further would be still great.
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