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The Zombocom Problem

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Re: The Zombocom Problem

#61

Post by berkes »

fragmede wrote: post #55
berkes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WordPress is the exact example of the opposite of your point. WP started as the edge of a wedge. But contrary to the examples in TLA, it didn't become an everything platform deliberate and predetermined, but organical and messy. It started as a "blogging tool" and only that - it still is to some extent in 2024: it still has traces of "blogs" in its DBA, code, templating and so on. It was successfull exactly because o…

What would you choose instead, in this day and age?

For what?

That's the crucial question. Because the important parameter to "what is best ?" isn't the "day and age", but the exact use-case, and to lesser extent, requirements, existing stacks, team capabilities etc etc.

If you have a company with 58 wordpress instances, then I'm pretty sure the best option for almost any use-case for the 59th instance is "wordpress".

But if you are an artist that makes and sells bracelets from local sea-shells, with little interest in learning technical stuff, you are almost certainly better of with an etsy and/or shopify. If only for the TCO.

And the bakery around the corner who just needs their opening hours and some nice impression in the form of a video, story and some images (brochureware) online, wix, squarespace or one of its many (open source) competitors. Or, if you just need a quick three-page landingpage for your tech startup, in a team of mostly software engineers, a hugo or jekyll site is quite probably by far preferable.

There are so many alternatives that "do one thing and do it well (or better than the generalists without focus)". It's really about having the ability to filter through these instead.

Re: The Zombocom Problem

#62

Post by bitwize »

robertlagrant wrote: post #53

> It can be anything, but first it has to be something specific. Spreadsheets definitely feel more like a platform. They aren't specific to what they started out on - they're very general purpose. The metaphor of "grid of numbers you can do stuff with" is extremely not-product-specific.

Spreadsheets were originally designed to mimic the paper spreadsheets accountants used.

Only with the addition of macro languages did they become do-everything platforms.

Re: The Zombocom Problem

#63

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

berkes wrote: post #61
fragmede wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you choose instead, in this day and age?

For what? That's the crucial question. Because the important parameter to "what is best ?" isn't the "day and age", but the exact use-case, and to lesser extent, requirements, existing stacks, team capabilities etc etc. If you have a company with 58 wordpress instances, then I'm pretty sure the best option for almost any use-case for the 59th instance is "wordpress". But if you are an artist that makes and sells brac…

That’s refreshingly sensible advice.

Thanks for that. It’s spot-on.

Re: The Zombocom Problem

#64

Post by raffraffraff »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #58
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #29

This may be a bit of an old allusion, but Lotus Notes is a great example of this. Notes is fundamentally a programmable, non-relational, client/server replicated database with a UI on top of it. It's a workflow engine for accomplishing whatever business processes a company might have that can be made to keep working pretty well when the client computer is offline. It can be anything. But it is remembered first and fo…

That's HCL Notes, now... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes

Probably because they already had to support it. HCL won IT support contracts in many banks across Europe and probably elsewhere. I reckon many of those banks still use old IBM tech like mainframes and Notes (for email and internal apps). It's hard to support something when it's EOL and you don't have the source code.

Re: The Zombocom Problem

#65

Post by PaulHoule »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #29

This may be a bit of an old allusion, but Lotus Notes is a great example of this. Notes is fundamentally a programmable, non-relational, client/server replicated database with a UI on top of it. It's a workflow engine for accomplishing whatever business processes a company might have that can be made to keep working pretty well when the client computer is offline. It can be anything. But it is remembered first and fo…

I spent about two years in early development of a "Zombocom" product and one question on my mind was "Whatever happened to Lotus Notes?" Superficially it seems the time is right for a rapid development platform for web apps based on an object database with synchronization support. I was sharply divided about the role of email in such a product:

I became a qmail fanatic around 1999 and enjoyed running a smart mail server but as we got into the early 2000's I experienced a series of crises involving worms, viruses, malware, spam, deliverability and such. Today I want nothing to do with running a mail server! It's not a problem where you can just invest once and it is done but instead it is like one of those service games.

I like the idea of email as a paradigm for asynchronous workflows, and if you're doing business by email (as in CRM) it is useful. On the other hand today the email market is pretty tied up with the likes of Gmail and Outlook

Re: The Zombocom Problem

#66

Post by kmoser »

weare138 wrote: post #17

So but how do we build software that can be anything without falling into the Zombocom trap? I believe that Bezos interview shows us exactly how. [insert list here] No offense, I'm from GenX, we were doing those things before Bezos came along in fact that was the norm. See VisiCalc one paragraph up for an example. Attempting to create markets for your product like with the Metaverse or blockchain solutions versus jus…

The article doesn't claim Bezos originated the idea. It just uses his quote to explain his logic. In fact, the article goes on to mention VisiCalc immediately after.

To extrapolate further: trying to be all things to all people didn't originate with any particular generation, or even in the software business. Companies have been trying to please too many customers forever, only to either finally settle on the right demographic or fail.

Re: The Zombocom Problem

#67

Post by evntdrvn »

PaulHoule wrote: post #65
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #29

This may be a bit of an old allusion, but Lotus Notes is a great example of this. Notes is fundamentally a programmable, non-relational, client/server replicated database with a UI on top of it. It's a workflow engine for accomplishing whatever business processes a company might have that can be made to keep working pretty well when the client computer is offline. It can be anything. But it is remembered first and fo…

I spent about two years in early development of a "Zombocom" product and one question on my mind was "Whatever happened to Lotus Notes?" Superficially it seems the time is right for a rapid development platform for web apps based on an object database with synchronization support. I was sharply divided about the role of email in such a product: I became a qmail fanatic around 1999 and enjoyed running a smart mail ser…

I worked at Seagate in the early 2010s, and they made pretty intensive use of Lotus Notes across the company—-it was pretty dang cool to see how sophisticated/useful the internal applications were that non-“developers” created!

Re: The Zombocom Problem

#68

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

raffraffraff wrote: post #64
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's HCL Notes, now... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes

Probably because they already had to support it. HCL won IT support contracts in many banks across Europe and probably elsewhere. I reckon many of those banks still use old IBM tech like mainframes and Notes (for email and internal apps). It's hard to support something when it's EOL and you don't have the source code.

Domino and Notes is still being actively developed by HCL... https://www.hcl-software.com/domino

Re: The Zombocom Problem

#69

Post by helpfulContrib »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #29

This may be a bit of an old allusion, but Lotus Notes is a great example of this. Notes is fundamentally a programmable, non-relational, client/server replicated database with a UI on top of it. It's a workflow engine for accomplishing whatever business processes a company might have that can be made to keep working pretty well when the client computer is offline. It can be anything. But it is remembered first and fo…

[dead]

Re: The Zombocom Problem

#70

Post by immibis »

alganet wrote: post #50
immibis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First they were a bookstore. The infrastructure came later.

You can design something in such a way that the most important and relevant piece of the solution comes later. The order doesn't matter. Amazon is full of zombocominess. It's not a bad thing. The name itself is very zombo, _it can be anything_. The book selling is a great MVP for their final goal, a huge wide ass platform. It's all over the company history (what they bought, how the grew). You can design stuff in all…

The zeroth iPhone only played music btw
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