JS_startup

An analogous question: Would you marry someone who doesn't floss? I mean, otherwise they're great, but there's all this hype around flossing and I thought everyone did it.

Word is that Grooveshark could become the next MegaUpload. A thought for anyone looking for a weekend project: An app that could export a Grooveshark playlist (not download the songs, just export artists and titles) would be really popular as I don't believe this functionality exists currently.

I once wrote a clone of Microsoft Word for a company looking to move away from Office dependency - I think you're really understating the complexity of something like Word when you call it a glorified textbox or say it should load as quickly as MSPaint because they both use the ribbon UI.

I don't understand what he's angry about. Photoshop, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, these are all enormously complicated programs that require resources to load. That doesn't make them bloatware and it doesn't make the programmers lazy.

His proposed solution sucks too. Show the UI while it's loading so the user can impotently click around waiting for the program to "turn on". Windows does this when it boots up and it drives me insane -- if the OS or program isn't in a usable state when you show it to me, don't show it to me

Loading speed is just one of a multitude of factors that come into play when making software. According to this Adobe employee it should be the chief most concern, even dominating other things like features, usability, UX, cost, technological debt, etc.

8 months for this? I thought that was the average length of a sentence given to murderers in the UK.

>"Office runs into tens of millions of lines of code." I am aware of that - my father doesn't give a shit. He wants "to download Office"

Unquestioningly bend to the capricious whims and desires of non-technical users, a winning strategy for any tech business.

Last month a user told me I should add full-fledged accounting and payroll management to my niche software so he doesn't have to buy QuickBooks. Better get cracking!

You're suggesting that Microsoft has brainwashed the global business community into thinking they need a single suite to perform those tasks? I'd say it's more plausible that they arrived at that conclusion on their own since it just works better

It's a little thing but the disembodied child's head on the landing page was a little creepy

Wow, I'm actually stunned. The general consensus seemed to be that Iran would pardon him at the last minute and just have him exiled. Maybe that will still be the case?

There might be a few, but I'd be willing to speculate that there are many MANY more examples where it did not work and the company either went under or had to perform a complete reversal like this one.

I'm not saying freemium will never work, but let's face it: it's ubiquity is because it was at one time the flavor of the month startup model that VC money was pouring into, not because it is a superior or effective business model.

I personally can't wait until the freemium model finally dies. It is extraordinarily difficult to pull off despite how popular it is and creates desperate decisions like this.

The correct way to transition from a freemium to paid service is to grandfather previous users in, not classlessly pull the rug out from under them and demand money or a backlink (seriously? $20M in venture capital and you're begging users for backlinks?)

Moreover, that e-mail was just really ham-fisted. Why not say "your service will be discontinued if you don't respond" instead of going thermonuclear with legal threats? It reeks of desperation and disregard for their existing clients.

Calling it: the OP is Victor Frankl

I'm speculating as well. From the article it sounds like he is second generation Korean or Chinese.

This sounds like a culture clash. Asian cultures (Korean and Chinese specifically) have a really unique family dynamic which you could describe as boundaryless; I worked for a Korean entrepreneur for a while and he said it's a foregone conclusion that if the business strikes it big his family members get to come share in the success.

Hsu should have tried harder to understand the cultural dynamic in the US.

I went through the sales processes for AdWords and Bing adCenter simultaneously and the difference was night and day. I could tell from the start that Google had zero interest in customer service and if something went wrong I'd be SOL.

Dropbox wouldn't have made the 10GB/affiliate deal if the trade off of more free storage for more users wasn't profitable. I doubt they care.

Another victim of the HN echo chamber. Here's the scoop: no one outside of these forums cares what framework you use. Your users won't, investors won't..it's about getting things done and bringing a product to market.

The fact that your framework choice is so agonizing shows that you might have become way more interested in gaining cred with the cool kids at HN than you have being an effective entrepreneur.

7) Commit seppuku

I would want the CEO to:

1) Immediately delete all of the non-user data

2) Send an apology e-mail to each Path user explaining the situation

3) Write, by hand, a corresponding apology letter for each Path user

4) Hold a townhall-style meeting in which members of the public can ask him questions

5) Pay, out of pocket, the travel expenses of anyone who attends the townhall meeting

6) Wear an indicator of shame (large necklace or a sign) for as long as he is CEO of the company

I've always found a lot of correlations between Anonymous and Al Qaeda. Not because of terrorism or exploding vans but because both are relatively unorganized collectives who appear much scarier than they are because independent operators/cells will claim they are flying under the group's banner, leading to headlines like "Anonymous Hacks Symantec".

The media eats up the concept of an organized global conspiracy group so it works out for everyone; the media makes money, the independent operators have a convenient, catch-all banner to fly under and the collective gets publicity for their cause.

A couple of notes:

In Chrome if I expand the window past its max-width the area to the right of the "Create" button on the dashboard is not colored properly.

I wasn't sure how to view my task index; maybe something more obvious than clicking on the links found hyperlink?

All in all it worked nicely, seems like a useful tool.

Horror!

Agreed. Only at a huge scale is a custom made e-mail solution time or cost effective.

Obviously the blog post was only talking about how effective it is for 37signals, but I fear many young startups will misinterpret it and waste a ton of time rolling their own mass e-mail solution.

Don't know why you're being downvoted; any business <$1M annual revenue that has to send loads of e-mail shouldn't be wasting time rolling their own solutions

You wouldn't lose anything, but enterprise and B2B software is an entirely different world than consumer software with some very different expectations.

Often times the reason screenshots aren't shown is because the application is so complex that its functionality couldn't possibly be shown with a few screenshots (enterprise software is often really ugly too). Same goes for pricing; pricing is going to vary based on the size of the purchase, what the company can afford, what discounts you give, etc. It's too complex to just throw onto the site.

If you haven't already, read up on the tragedy surrounding Edwin Howard Armstrong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong)

Edwin invented FM radio which RCA saw as a threat to its AM empire (much like Edison saw Tesla's AC method of power distribution as a threat to DC). Edwin committed suicide after being bankrupted by RCA's legal onslaught. He never got to see FM radio become a success.

A UX lesson I learned long ago: If you have to have an option for it then it's a poor design

Deck chairs..Titanic..

Way too late. RIM has very little in the pipeline and still seems determined to try and make the PlayBook work.

Rumors are that they're shopping the company around but asking too much.