For those few who might don’t get the reference, is about the (legendary) site zombo.com
The very first element in TFA is a link to zombo.com.
The Zombocom Problem
71–80 of 83 posts
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#72This 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 remember a long long time ago people used Filemaker Pro for all sorts of small data driven applications. I used to think stuff like that would be the future of computing, but instead Filemaker Pro faded into obscurity and most people just use Excel for those kinds of problems now. Or worse, the problem is solved in a clunky and fragile way with outrageously expensive Peoplesoft/Workday/Salesforce type solutions.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#73How dare they sully the Zombo.com name. Stop trying to make the phrase 'Zombocom problem' happen.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#74I hadn't heard that term before. When I was in technical sales, we called it the "Tampon Sale" technique, based on an old joke:
Two little boys found a five dollar bill on the street and went to the store to spend it. The first little boy came up to his friend with his arms full of candy. His friend just had a box of tampons. "Why do you want that, instead of candy?" asked the first boy. "Look here" said the second boy. "If we buy this we can go swimming and hiking and horseback riding...."
We were trying to sell an engine and quickly learned that the Tampon Sale fails spectacularly. We had to pivot to vertical solutions.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The first widespread portable music player, the Sony Walkman TPS-L2, was in fact a modified recorder that had a platform for audio that punched above its weight.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#76I have taken this approach with personal projects as well. In the past, I divided up the functionality into a bunch of neatly-organized classes at the beginning and then implemented each one in separate files. Big mistake. Much better is to put it all into one, ugly file until the kinks are worked out and then organize it later, at least in my opinion. It’s also much better for working in a flow state so that I don’t…
> Much better is to put it all into one, ugly file until the kinks are worked out and then organize it later IMO this defer-until-needed approach depends a bit on having better tooling to use whenever the rework happens. Stuff like languages with statically-checkable types, good "Find Usages" IDEs, tests that exercise the overall architecture, etc. When you can't count on those things, a constant gradual approach is…
It’s funny, I did a lot of python programming early in my career, and I didn’t realize just how afraid I was of refactoring until I started doing embedded work. Even as bad as the weakly typed C type system is, I found the compiler to be a godsend for changing my code later.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#77So 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 d…
But the article uses the phrase 'Bezos' approach' as if it's somehow attributed to Bezos or a new concept. For some reason Wall St. and Silicon Valley love learning the simple things the hard way then act like they had some great epiphany when they finally figure it out.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#78Classic hindsight/survivorship bias for me.
Bezo’s approach is sublime. It holds two seemingly irreconcilable insights in tension and transcends either lesser alternative:
Come on.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#79This 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 have the vague memory that it was a distributed reimplementation of PLATO Notes, which had otherwise similar capabilities but was born as a bug tracking system?
It was more of a message board. I mean, I guess you could use a message board as a bug tracking system, but most of the uses I saw were more groups of people planning things... graduation parties, keggers, jam sessions, etc.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I was going to say you couldn't pay me to use Notes again. I went to the link you posted and here was on the top carousel something interesting... So domini/notes is under active development, by a witch company no less.
I just have a terrible experience using Notes. I have either somehow erased or locked away most of this memory but I remember getting back to Outlook with a job at a different place and thinking I'll never bad mouth excel again. Yes, notes was that terrible for me.
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