Re:Apache Wave
by woah on Friday April 04, 2014 @07:58PM
(#7535244)
It seems pretty clear to me that option 1 is by far the better one. Open source projects are great at creating protocols.
However, they are exceedingly terrible at making consumer products. There's a lot of branding, marketing and design that goes into a successful consumer product. This is especially true for a product with network effects. Open source projects are bad at this for several reasons:
* People with these skills are simply not as likely to be involved in open source projects.
* Developers will create features that they want. This is great, but what a particular developer wants is not necessarily what is best for the project.
* Any one attempt at a consumer product will likely fail. The work you could have put into a protocol that would have made hundreds of consumer products easy to build has now been sunk into one, which may or may not succeed.
Also, specific implementations will become dated very quickly. Your stack sounds horrifying in this day and age. With server modules in a few different languages, and a minimal clientside library, there would have been hundreds of Wave variants at this point.
However, they are exceedingly terrible at making consumer products. There's a lot of branding, marketing and design that goes into a successful consumer product. This is especially true for a product with network effects. Open source projects are bad at this for several reasons:
* People with these skills are simply not as likely to be involved in open source projects. * Developers will create features that they want. This is great, but what a particular developer wants is not necessarily what is best for the project. * Any one attempt at a consumer product will likely fail. The work you could have put into a protocol that would have made hundreds of consumer products easy to build has now been sunk into one, which may or may not succeed.
Also, specific implementations will become dated very quickly. Your stack sounds horrifying in this day and age. With server modules in a few different languages, and a minimal clientside library, there would have been hundreds of Wave variants at this point.