I still don't have an answer for him. It sounds just as strange to me too.
This reflection [1] came from the founders of RethinkDB, a competitor of MongoDB at the time:
"It turned out that correctness, simplicity of the interface, and consistency are the wrong metrics of goodness for most users. The majority of users wanted these three trade-offs instead:
- A use case. We set out to build a good database system, but users wanted a good way to do X (e.g. a good way to store JSON documents from hapi, a good way to store and analyze logs, a good way to create reports, etc.).
- Timely arrival. They wanted the product to actually exist when they needed it, not three years later.
- Palpable speed [...]. MongoDB mastered these workloads brilliantly, while we fought the losing battle of educating the market."
MongoDB narrowed things down for a specific use case, and became the best for that use case. This comes with trade-offs. MongoDB was probably not the best database for healthcare back in the days, but that is OK. It did the job very well for other use cases and industries. And over time, they fixed the issue around losing data and became more stable. Essentially, they made developers feel like superheroes, and over time improved their product, and eventually grabbed a massive market share.
[1] https://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.htm...
It used to be open source. It's not anymore
> The parent company is a listed company and worth $15BN, 3x more than Elastic to put some perspective.
That's purely a capitalistic argument and makes no difference to whether the product is any good. For example, there's plenty of "churches" that are richer than MongoDB Inc. and absolutely abhorrent and evil.
> This comes with trade-offs.
The only thing that required the trade-off of data loss was cheating in benchmarks in order to hoodwink naive potential users into using their dangerous product. MongoDB Inc. has always preferred to lie to their users. It is not a database company; it's a marketing company with a product they label as a database. And that's a smart way to make money, sure, because of vendor lock-in, but it's not a smart way to gain trust.
As engineers we bear responsibility for how our work impacts society. Mongodb may have made their investors a lot of money, but they did sloppy work and didn’t do right by their customers. That’s not a success in my book.