"Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster." Huh?
Now you know why they failed.
Read with "Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist" for context.
RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
101–110 of 237 posts
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#102RDB is fantastic, I’m using it today.
You are right! IMHO RDB is a good piece of software. I'm using it on one side project and it is working good for all my needs
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#103What’s with all of this seemingly whitewashing of history? Slava himself described why it failed. I mean as founder you have to be laser focused. Yet he was too busy trying to win over his “hot new employee” than focusing on the database. There is an archive of his deleted tweets here where he describes it: https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05... And then there was an article that seems to be…
Eh, I think you’re way too quick to criticise him for it. He’s human, after all. And in love on top of it! Personally, I appreciate the frankness. Too bad it got deleted.
What a romantic take on a failure of fiduciary duty towards ones employees and investors. Imagine being an employee there and thinking you’re going to change databases forever only to have the founder being distracted and then the whole outfit failing.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#104Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#105What’s with all of this seemingly whitewashing of history? Slava himself described why it failed. I mean as founder you have to be laser focused. Yet he was too busy trying to win over his “hot new employee” than focusing on the database. There is an archive of his deleted tweets here where he describes it: https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05... And then there was an article that seems to be…
People write online way too much about their personal lives.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#106> Developers love building developer tools, often for free. So while there is massive demand, the supply vastly outstrips it. This is key, and plays out over and over again in different forms. There are no points for difficulty, only supply and demand. PG puts this well [1]: > That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job.…
So what happens then when a polished open source solution solves for a problem that developer tools cannot solve for? That speaks nothing of demand and only signals that there is no alternative supply. It also speaks nothing to the boringness of the hypothetical solution.
I suspect by asking that question any reader starts immediately scratching their head thinking up what problem/solution that could possibly be. Don’t. That confuses product for business.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#107Database 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…
Beautiful, this is exactly what's been on my mind for a while. After building a ton of "cool" infrastructure technology, I got recommendations from friends to sell it. But in the back of my mind somewhere I had going on what you've now made clear - that people won't actually want to _buy_ that technology, they'd much rather buy the business-specific stuff that is made possible _because_ of that technology.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I firmly believe that RethinkDB could have been a huge player along with the likes of MongoDB and Elasticsearch if they could have gotten additional funding or focused more on business development. Note: both MongoDB and Elasticsearch are now hugely successful public companies. - Changefeeds were so useful and still to this day not really matched in quality. - Official client libraries were very high quality. I mainl…
RethinkDB could have been a huge player along with the likes of MongoDB MongoDB is a weird one because what they had didn't even meet the most basic requirements of "a database", that you could store something in it and reliably get it back out. But they somehow converted their joke of a product into enough money to buy WiredTiger, rebrand its product as theirs, and profit. It's the ultimate expression of "fake it 't…
Wiretiger replaced the mmap storage engine. It was more of a library than a server.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are outliers, and even then most people I know with a GitHub account are using it for free. Same with IntelliJ - most of us at Google were using the Community Edition.
Andy Gocke put it on twitter better than I've ever seen it anywhere else: 'Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to dig for gold with their teeth.' https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328?lan...
I chuckled a bit, but you and I know that devs are not savages :)
I'd probably word it differently:
Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to make their own shovels to dig for gold (because it is often cheaper than buying).
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#110[deleted]