Oh man reading that I just realized that was exactly describing the type of consulting gigs I always get (and I'm young).
Are we a side effect of the pump-and-dump VC culture or is this a legitimate new way of developing software/products?
However, I feel like people aren't very upfront with the fact that they are building on top of APIs. For whatever reason, there's this perception that arranging existing resources into a more valuable arrangement is somehow not a valid approach.
I'd love to hear others thoughts on this.
Imagine how many MVPs Yahoo's existing staff could create if allocated $30 million of development time for skunkworks projects...
There is a lot to be said for building the right thing; but the actual ability to assemble such products are very common and even the very premium skills are definitely for sale at market rates much lower than $15MM per year.
"Summly's entire business model seems to revolve around catering to this demographic. Frankly, it pains me."
I reads like a critique of Chubby Checker's "Twist" from a professor a Julliard. Perhaps, and I say that because I can't know what they were really thinking, but perhaps that was the point. This company had successfully "catered to this demographic" (which was defined as young hipster like brogrammers) and while those guys drink their PBR and deck out their mancaves perhaps it is a demographic that Yahoo desperately wants to reach? Maybe the whole point was that Yahoo folks were building things for middle-aged dot boomers and not for the cool kids.
Maybe the goal was to get more people who could quickly assemble a MVP from existing APIs that appealed to the emerging cohort of buyers and trendsetters. Maybe NLP wasn't the point.