91–100 of 237 posts
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Mongodb has a 15b market cap, and mongo is widely derided.
But it’s the only real player in their market. RethinkDB with MongoDB ‘performance’ would have blown them out of the water.
Not at all. All of MongoDB is just a feature in Postgres, and Postgres does it better, and Postgres does hundreds more things too.
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I’d say that’s about as utopian of an idea as the unrestricted free market. In theory, sure, sounds great, but the pragmatic timescale it would take to get there would be beyond lifetimes. We’ll all be dead by the time these systems reach their true form. In your particular example for instance, human nature would wreck havoc in the form of abuse. I will point to (incoming snark) the very rare cases of slavery, under…
What's utopian about it? What do children pay their parents, or parents pay their kids? That's the relationship people start out with and one that is most natural. People seem to think that there is money, and before money, there was barter. That's fake news made up by economists (the barter before money bit). People have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Money has been around for a few thousand in sele…
If at any time people decide they no longer believe in home ownership, then the house I built for you had no value since no one will build my home when it’s my turn.
This wouldn’t be a problem if you just paid me cash since it stores value.
With four years of hindsight, the estimate of DBaaS and managed database hosting companies of being https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/03/10/mo... ), which means that assuming RethinkDB's estimates were correct, the market they wrote off as too small was actually about to explode into something much larger. That's not to say that they would have succeeded if they'd gone after that though; instead we…
MongoDB's stock price is quite remarkable, given how dismissive a lot of people (including myself) on HacherNews have been of their offering. It goes to show that HackerNews consensus != reality. I do wonder where/how Mongo makes their money - if anybody has some insight, please share.
Its not a contradiction to dislike mongodb technically well still thinking its a good business.
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Those are the exceptions that prove the rule. It's not impossible to succeed in developer tools; it's just a lot harder than other markets. And you usually also need an accidental luck factor like being the perfect product at the perfect time.
More like all dev tools that I can buy as an individual are easy to pay for. Things like a database would have to go through procurement if I wanted to use them and they weren’t free, and I avoid procurement like the plague. Why the hell wants to spend their time justifying why something is the best solution to people that don’t have a clue. I’d only go through that if the difference in quality was so palpable that I…
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Think about the developer tools and systems you use, then think "what would I expect to pay for these?" Chances are the answer is that you'd expect them to be free or you'd find something else. That's what makes it a bad market.
I think jetbrains, github, atlassian et al would like a word with you.
Yeah, but those are outliers drowning in a sea of free development tools. The price that they can charge is effectively limited by how much it would cost some to replicate the subset of that tool that they actually use.
A business that is paying $X/year for $DEVSOFTWARE for their entire devteam pays that only while $X is less than the cost of paying for developing the subset of $DEVSOFTWARE that they use. That limits what Atlassian can charge.
Compare to selling a tool to accountants - it doesn't matter how much $ACCSOFTWARE costs, the accounting department will only shop around, they will never just write their own (outliers excepted, of course).
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On the one hand I usually love to drop in a bit of spolsky wisdom myself, and that quote stands well on its own, but the article itself is unfortunately marred by the fact the Microsoft products mentioned were just unsuccessful early attempts at iCloud and Google Accounts, both of which have since seen considerable "killer app" level success. I guess easy with hindsight to say "ah yes, but smartphones".
And the return to timesharing systems.
Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se , they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to s…
Your comment reminds me of April Dunford's post on how she helped position a database product: https://www.thefxck.com/interviews/product-positioning-april...
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And the return to timesharing systems.
Is that a everything-new-is-old description for cloud offerings?
"As computing technology develops it becomes more efficient to take centralised computing resources and distribute them closer to the user. As network technology develops it becomes more efficient to centralise them again. Further advances redistribute and yet further advances recentralise. This pattern has been noticed several times in the history of computation."
And the most fascinating thing was that it was from decades ago, perhaps even 1960! I've never been able to find the quote again. Does anyone recognise it? Perhaps I imagined it.