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Okay, that’s not very nice, but seriously, over the years I have seen so many great ideas die because people went one step too far and had their system crash and burn. “Good enough” is just that, and that’s the sweet spot. That one extra feature that very few people care about could be the final straw.
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Established: 21 November 2004
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4 comments
This evening, Jeevan says – “Sorry about the errors.
We are currently working to stabilize the system and eliminate the “Service not available” messages. New servers are also soon going to be added to the cluster to increase our capacity. These error messages and instability should go away in the near future.”
I hope I live that long.
That would be until the next time.
He needs to stop “making things better” and start making them stable.
I take my share of the responsibility: I paid one small fee to a talented hobbyist whose hobby is a commenting system that grows repeatedly beyond its capacity. That was my decision, and for the moment, I have to live with it.
I suspect Jeevan is very talented at design and coding, but not necessarily at scalability issues, and certainly not at business and sustainability. He could use a bit more sense of diplomacy in support, too: one does not simply “disappear” for three weeks and expect customers, free or not, to tolerate it. Maybe I do him an injustice, but from a customer’s standpoint, that’s how it comes across.
Most small, independent developers who find themselves with a winner on their hands, as Jeevan surely had, sell out… yeah, I know; that’s an unpleasant phrase… to larger corp’s with more experience in long-term development of the product. If they don’t do that, they imperil everything they’ve worked hard to develop, because tiny companies, even those run by very savvy, talented people, simply don’t have the depth, stamina and capitalization to keep it up. Jeevan could be a genius at all the tech aspects, and still go to ground out in the real world.
I’m willing to give him a bit more time, especially as there is no direct equivalent, no other standalone commenting system, to which I could switch. But ultimately, even as a blogging hobbyist myself, I may have to switch to blogging s/w that has commenting built in. In this day and age, commenting is simply not optional in the world of blogs.
Scaling up is the biggest problem there is on ‘Net with any product because you are dependent on your tools and they aren’t always as advertised because the limits are often theoretical, rather than tested. That’s one of the reasons I went solo, I was tired of being subject to other peoples’ problems.
The innovators rarely make the big money with their ideas, because the traits that make someone an innovator work against them when the “great idea” becomes a ‘job’. He needs some help and doesn’t know how to create an organization.
Comment threads are the fun of blogging, they are the interaction. Without comments you have a website, not a blog. I didn’t need WordPress to build a website.