My current suspicion is that Dalton has no idea how to build what he wants, in fact he doesn't even know what the thing he wants is. So he's fanning the flames on this discussion to let everyone else come up with something for him.
I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it.
A customer who wants to pay you to mess around with new ideas and come up with something great. Nothing more boring than client that knows exactly what they want.
Yep.
My experience is that the only want to pay for the "coming up with something great" part, not the messing around with new ideas.
Worse still, they only want to pay for what they see, which is usually just the tip of the iceberg.
Give me a boring client over someone with lots of imagination, any day.
Customer wants A, B and C. You point out that A and B collide, and offer a solution, D. Customer insists on A, B and C. You tell him again. Customer insists on A, B and C. You create A, B and C. Customer realizes that A and B collide and that A, B and C are really not working as imagined. Customer blames you. You present D again. Customer caves in and orders D, as a replacement for A and B. Customer blames the additional cost on you and is unhappy.
Customer wants H, I and J. You tell him that he wants M, N and O. But that M, N and O cost twice as much as H, I and J. Customer is furious. You want the business. So you build H, I and J. Customer realizes it's not working. Customer blames you and is unhappy.
Customer wants X. You ask him why. Because of Q. You realize that the customer would need E instead of X. You offer X but you build E instead, because it's possible within the same budget and time window. You relabel E to X. Customer is happy. His vision worked.
How do you correlate that with the mostly-functional alpha which already has 90% of what I use twitter for?
I wasn't expecting anything functional for 5-6 months, and, as it exists, it's already mostly there.
I don't mean technically. I'm sure Dalton is quite qualified to build anything he commits to. I mean he doesn't know how to build it because he doesn't know what he's building. (Yet.)
Except the rules didn't really change.
To argue otherwise is like saying that it made no sense for my parents to have a second child, because they already had one. Aren't two kids, with similar genetics and similar environment, simply redundant?
Obviously not. You can't duplicate the original even if you try. Nor is that the point. The point is to diversify.
I think Twitter is working fine at the moment – whatever ugly shoe they're allegedly about to drop, it hasn't dropped on me yet. But it's still great to try and reinvent Twitter, just as it was great to try and reinvent Perl, even though Perl still works just fine. You end up somewhere different.
This is bigger than Dalton, it's about what we want the services we use to look like.
Hence, the money being an intentional distraction (red herring) from the real issues.
I did not commit to app.net, but I am philosophically backing them. I think the meta-goal is right, even if this particular incantation is (or isn't) the right one.