The Curse of Xanadu | Hacker News Reader

The Curse of Xanadu

wired.com

38 pointsb-man18 comments

I came out of this article with a new respect for John Walker of Autodesk. Here's his take on the collision of architecture astronauts and waterfall project planning:

John Walker, Xanadu's most powerful protector, later wrote that during the Autodesk years, the Xanadu team had "hyper-warped into the techno-hubris zone." Walker marveled at the programmers' apparent belief that they could create "in its entirety, a system that can store all the information in every form, present and future, for quadrillions of individuals over billions of years." Rather than push their product into the marketplace quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.

"When this process fails," wrote Walker in his collection of documents from and about Autodesk, "and it always does, that doesn't seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It's always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc. - precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible in the first place."

http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_108.html continues with:

Absolutely the only way I know to succeed with an innovative product is to throw something together quickly, push it out the door, persuade some lunatic early-adopters to start using it, and then rapidly evolve it on a quick turnaround cycle based on market acceptance and driven by a wish list from actual users.

The tools that we shape, will in turn shape us. The trouble is that if you release a project early, the people who use it or participate in it could become used to its current state and fight against any change.

You can see this with Microsoft products. Microsoft has to have its updated products compete with its previous products.

This is also true of Project Xanadu. If we consider the Web as an early form of Xanadu, we can see that it was released prematurely. There are lots of design flaws and over the years band-aides have been applied to them. There are still many people who fight against these band-aides (I'm looking at you IE6 users and corps who force the use of that browser). We're stuck using hacks for what should be easy. People are now used to do things the hard way and using hacks and cannot easily envision a system that doesn't suck.

Worse is Better is about LISP vs. C, but it fits Xanadu vs. WWW.

worse-is-better:

It is important to remember that the initial virus has to be basically good. If so, the viral spread is assured as long as it is portable. Once the virus has spread, there will be pressure to improve it, possibly by increasing its functionality closer to 90%, but users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing. Therefore, the worse-is-better software first will gain acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing.

the-right-thing:

First, the right thing needs to be designed. Then its implementation needs to be designed. Finally it is implemented. Because it is the right thing, it has nearly 100% of desired functionality, and implementation simplicity was never a concern so it takes a long time to implement. It is large and complex. It requires complex tools to use properly. The last 20% takes 80% of the effort, and so the right thing takes a long time to get out, and it only runs satisfactorily on the most sophisticated hardware.

The Web was only half-baked, but it wasn't released prematurely.

Anything actually working was released when only half-baked; perfectionists either never release anything or they release it so late that it never gains any traction against its already-in-use competitors. The first release of anything that is going to succeed is effectively going to be a prototype, whether the inventors intended it to be or not.

We have held to ideals created long ago, in different times and places, the very best ideals we could find. We have carried these banners unstained to this new place, we now plant them and hope to see them floating in the wind. But it is dark and quiet and lonely here, and not yet dawn.

I'll drink to that.

I worked with Roger Gregory for a few weeks in 1999, 4 years after this article was written. He still hadn't recovered from Xanadu. I got the impression that he never really would.

Heh. I worked for a startup that had three ex-Xanadu refugees. Never, ever work for a company that has more than one; once they reach critical mass you are doomed. Favorite memory from said startup was the PERT charts for "the big picture" used the color purple to denote items that "would make a good Ph.D thesis if you know anyone at Stanford or Berkeley looking for a topic..."

That must have been at Linuxcare... I was there too and have a few memories of him.

Yes. My project there was to build the linuxcare.com website in the 3 weeks between the day they got funded and the first LinuxWorld Expo. Roger worked on the website with me.

I remember being introduced to you in the hallway one day, but I don't think I saw you again after that.

Yeah, I started sometime after the LinuxWorld Expo. Roger later got let go by the guy they brought in to be a 'CTO' sort of guy, Sal Meola (who was in turn let go, and subsequently replaced by the infamous Doug Nassaur: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4883&cid=11425... )

Haha, I couldn't remember why I didn't take a job there. Thanks for reminding me. After I met Sal Meola I said to David Sifry: "wtf?" David assured me that he was someone who "got things done", but I really couldn't bear the thought of working with him.

He wasn't great, but Doug... shudder. If Sal was perhaps not the right guy for the job, Doug inspired outright loathing in people.

I've worked with Ted and it's a myth that he makes vapour ware. For instance, Gzz is a fully-working program.

Also, I have a 1989 article from Language Technology (Louis Rossetto's first magazine before Wired), and it's a breezy interview with Ted about Zigzag, and other issues, with no malice. I have no idea why Louis turned on Ted later in Wired (this very article). I might post the LT article.

This article is great and I hope to see many more like it on hacker news. I know most people hate the goldfish tendency of most social networks to go through "forgotten" articles, but stuff like this needs to be brought up. Long and interesting articles make this site so much more livable :P.

Why do projects name Xanadu always seems to mean some boondoggle?

Xanadu is a name of a mall in Jersey that was supposed to open in 2007 but got pushed back next summer. Even then, it might not even survive the recession.

I guess the lesson is never call your projects Xanadu or Duke Nukem Forever.

Well Xanadu was a thing before the mall in Jersey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu

"It became fabled as a metaphor for opulence, most famously in the English Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan."

A well-written piece, but I would not call it news.

Down vote me for being glib but this article is just too long.

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