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A comment on Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative. Parent comment

Re:Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative by atombender on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @01:02PM (#9772944)
It's rather funny how Stewart Butterfield keeps trying to build games, and ending up with social apps.

His first company, Ludicorp, tried to build an MMORPG called Game Neverending, which never launched, and they pivoted to create Flickr, apparently based on the same platform (which is why ".gne" URLs proliferated Flickr originally).

With Tiny Speck, he created Glitch, another MMORPG, which closed a little more than a year after launch. Tiny Speck then pivoted to launch Slack, based on a chat app they had built internally while developing their game.

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Re:Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative by misterbwong on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @02:55PM (#9773690)
It makes sense, in a weird way. MMO's are such huge projects that developers are forced to create supporting subsystems to complete it (e.g. Image/asset processing and storage system - Flickr, in-game chat and collaboration system - Slack).

I'm impressed that Stewart Butterfield is able to look at these systems and recognize which ones could be a viable (and successful!) stand-alone product.

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