DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR TO ANYONE:
stuntpilot99 in a comment on news:
Ah but you missed the other principle in Information Systems:
Marketing get involved, mention super whizzy version 2, with added bling(tm), and 2,000,000 extra users by Xmas, and profit margins will go up because we can target ads more tightly. Now the suits get involved because someone mentioned lots of $ signs.
It never works properly, alienates half the existing userbase, super whizzy v2 becomes slightly creaky-whizzy 0.3.1a, and bling(tm) apparently had a licensing problem and there's a technical problem with ad demographics that would require a ground up database rewrite that no one thought of (except the programmer who mentioned it, but was told not to be so negative). Two of the biggest selling points that most users actually wanted are just silently not there. Ever.
It now needs 1.5x the amount of processor and disk to serve the same product that has bits of 1.0 and 2.0 and sort-of creaks along in a roundabout way with some interesting regression bugs. Many sub-groups who weren't supposed to be impacted at all turn out to have been relying on never-advertised features and suddenly the place is a lot less attractive to them.
Profit margins go down as a few leave for X++ alpha, others for BorgBook etc. Most silently grumble along, but use the site a little less, and wonder why the sense of community seems to be steadily dying, and why are their friends all migrating to different new sites!
Six months later the company wonders why their standing overheads are noticeably up, yet profits, pageviews, users and margins are slightly down.
The following six months are spent getting back to precisely where they were - just in time for marketing to talk about super whizzy 3...
Meanwhile they receive a lawsuit for copying the look and feel of BorgBook(tm)(R), and another from Fruit for copying shiny buttons.
Welcome to "progress" (web version) :)
Ah but you missed the other principle in Information Systems:
Marketing get involved, mention super whizzy version 2, with added bling(tm), and 2,000,000 extra users by Xmas, and profit margins will go up because we can target ads more tightly. Now the suits get involved because someone mentioned lots of $ signs.
It never works properly, alienates half the existing userbase, super whizzy v2 becomes slightly creaky-whizzy 0.3.1a, and bling(tm) apparently had a licensing problem and there's a technical problem with ad demographics that would require a ground up database rewrite that no one thought of (except the programmer who mentioned it, but was told not to be so negative). Two of the biggest selling points that most users actually wanted are just silently not there. Ever.
It now needs 1.5x the amount of processor and disk to serve the same product that has bits of 1.0 and 2.0 and sort-of creaks along in a roundabout way with some interesting regression bugs. Many sub-groups who weren't supposed to be impacted at all turn out to have been relying on never-advertised features and suddenly the place is a lot less attractive to them.
Profit margins go down as a few leave for X++ alpha, others for BorgBook etc. Most silently grumble along, but use the site a little less, and wonder why the sense of community seems to be steadily dying, and why are their friends all migrating to different new sites!
Six months later the company wonders why their standing overheads are noticeably up, yet profits, pageviews, users and margins are slightly down.
The following six months are spent getting back to precisely where they were - just in time for marketing to talk about super whizzy 3...
Meanwhile they receive a lawsuit for copying the look and feel of BorgBook(tm)(R), and another from Fruit for copying shiny buttons.
Welcome to "progress" (web version) :)