June 5, 2005
my first podcast
[MY FIRST PODCAST:] Seventy-six freakin’ minutes of me rabbiting on about blogging, reboot 7.0 and whatnot. Thanks to Nicole Simon for doing the interview.
[THINGAMY:] If you don’t know Sig or his work, you wouldn’t know what the heck he was on about in this post.
But I have the sneaking suspicion he’s made a real breakthrough with his new software, Thingamy.
Go read the tea leaves and let me know what you think.
I don’t know Hugh, but that looks like a lot of hand waving. There are very few silver bullets in software. Just incremental improvements.
Perhaps… time will tell etc.
I had a conversation with Sig over Skype a few weeks back and looked at his demo. At the moment he’s got a long way to go and what concerns me more than anything is how much time he has spent getting to where he is. You can no longer take years to develop anything (no matter what Joel says). Current development trends are to build good software much faster than ever before by remixing stuff that’s already out there (yes I was at eTech), not by building what you think will be the be-all, end-all bit of software. Here’s the deal: no matter how good you think you are, you can never have enough domain knowledge to build something that works for everyone. You will also never have enough money to compete against everyone on every front. Period. It makes much more sense to integrate with others using open formats (such as RSS and REST) and to focus on your niche (insert long-tail reference here).
Anyhow, Sig seems like a nice guy but based on what I’ve seen and based on his endless hand-waving, I think that betting on his software is a bad idea. Sorry Sig.
I just realized that the piece by Joel is from 2001. That’s 4 years ago! I wonder if he still believes what he wrote…
Thanks for your candor, Anthony, always appreciated.
Hey, you may be proved right. Or wrong. Either way, if Sig allows the the bloggers to “take a bat” to his software, he’ll get to where he needs to be faster than he would without us.
So yeah, I’m watching to see what happens with greaet interest.
Great points here. I haven’t been watching Thingamy closely enough to tell hand-waving from not, but it did make me think of something.
Movable Type, on which this blog runs, is an inspired, innovative, messy batch of software. In many places it positively screams “hack,” but its adoption by so many techies attests to the underlying brilliance as well. Plus of course it’s made a few bucks for Six Apart, so it would have been a great bet to invest in early on, even though there was plenty of hand-waving going on then too.
I think these days, the key to software innovation is to get your big ideas working and get them out there, knowing you’ll have to do some cleanup afterwards. (As Six Apart is doing, much to their credit.) There are still types of software that take ten years to make good, but the point is largely irrelevant for web-based software. If it can be *compelling* in six months, it can still be alive long enough to become “good.” And if not, well… I wouldn’t bet on anyone wanting to launch something after more than a year under the radar. I tried that once, and it wasn’t pretty: I was trounced by inferior technology more boldly deployed.
In preparing to do the blog thing, I considered writing my own software. I’ve now spent enough time with Movable Type plug-ins and templates that I probably could’ve had my own system up and running by now — but I’m still going with MT. Because they have a lot of good ideas and a real passion for their domain, and also the eyes of a lot of smart people who want to help them improve.
Funny, the one thing the hype on Thingamy.com reminds me of most is Ruby on Rails.
“Funny, the one thing the hype on Thingamy.com reminds me of most is Ruby on Rails.”
Where have you heard Thingamy mentioned anywhere outside of this blog? Ruby on Rails has meat and thus it warrents at least some of the hype.
Anthony, Anthony — at least you have only kept “hand waving” from your earlier comments in May — “The Thingamy site is nothing but a bit of hand-waving and silly and completely absurd statements”.
Appreciate that
Why not lean back and wait a bit, perhaps you’re right, perhaps you’re not… you seemed to be a nice guy too… and you have nothing invested in this but your… ehh… strong statements. So hang in there, let me do the sweating
Reading about Thingamy reminds me of this site: http://www.davesnextmove.com/today.html, where Dave Duffield claims to be building new business software using a flexible, open source model.
Which also leads me to two recent IT Conversations podcasts about open source and the nature of changing competition.
Respectively, these are Larry Augustine (http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail493.html) and Clayton Christensen (http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail135.html).
It looks as if the next several years in the enterprise space could be most interesting!
Ou est le boeuf?
Also Sig,
Think about it, if you’re right, and Anthony’s wrong, then he’ll always be known as “The guy who was wrong about Thingamy”.
So now Anthony’s got a personal stake in Thingamy as well, whether he wants it or not. Heh.
I have no problem being the guy who was wrong about anything. I’ve made mistakes along the way as has everyone who’s ever tried to do anything which requires taking chances. I would also be happy to sit back and watch if it weren’t for the fact that Hugh keeps talking about Thingamy. See, Hugh, this is all your fault.
MS-DOS was an embarassing pile of Sh*t, Windows didn’t work, SAP R/3 version 1.0 was … incomplete. Apache is named that way because of the number of Patches, (geddit?)
Commercial software gets developed on incomplete budgets, that’s the way it is.
Oracle was developed more or less on a DoD budget. Feature complete, More or less, but grace of the Military Industrial Complex. (That’s OK, but don’t let them own it after the initial objectives are met.)
Now, Sig may or may not be the next paradigm, but everyone, and I mean everyone, in the integration space is wondering how to make the web into a machine that allows process as well as data integration.
And Sig is smart. Is he right? Is he the next paradigm disruptor? I hope he succeeds, but the point is that you will be hard pressed to spot what comes next.
Ken Olson of DEC. VAX. Superb machines. “No-one needs a computer in the home.” Uh-Oh.
When I play Half-Life II I use machines that would have made any mainframe shop in the 1990s weep with envy in terms of raw power. (Yeah OK, not reliable. throughput sucks, etc.)
Point is, you don’t know. Google. 100 thousand servers in one rack? Why? Hiring Operating Systems experts like hell? Why?
All I can say is that in IT if you make a prediction, better make it ironic.
Anthony, I meant the hype *on* Thingamy.com — as in, what’s written there. Not hype encountered elsewhere. Sorry I wasn’t more clear.
I had a few paragraphs about how RoR has gone pretty quickly from “guys making ridiculous claims about their software project” to “wow, this is cool, I might use it.” But my comment was already way too long.