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ArsDigita Shut Down
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Looks like it's official. Philip Greenspun's ArsDigita has been closed, its assets sold to Red Hat. No word on what Red Hat is planning to do with the GPL'd ArsDigita Community System." You may remember ArsDigita from its grand plans during the dot-com boom.
Did that ever take off to any extent?
...is how much of arsdigita was skill, and how much was dotcom bubble.
Greenspun is right, he and some friends built the company up to be quite formidable. It could be argued that they did this at just the correct time. He personally had a lot of technical insight (as evidenced by his book Philip and Alex's guide to Web Publishing) but was perhaps lacking in business acumen.My own suspicion is if they were still in charge and had *not* gone for funding, the company would still be around. It has been unfortunate watching the company stagnate, and the layman would certainly see the progression of success, funding, stagnation, winding up.
The VC's certainly didn't seem to understand the culture when they took on the company, which led to quite a few people leaving, and disquiet from the people who had previously supported the culture and ethos of the firm. Whether it was this that caused the problems, or the simple fact that the company, once obtaining approximately 30 million, would have to earn that back to be even back to 0, it is difficult to tell.
When Greenspun took on the VC's, which was a gutsy move which ended up in court as fully described here, he failed to take the company back, but it is conjectured that he got a nice settlement in the article.
What do people think? Was his culture a winner? He comes in for quite a bit of stick about his methods to get the best out of software engineers (work them extremely hard, don't give them a family life, but give them fishbowls, toys, and the hope of a ferrari). I personally don't think they should have gone to the VC's but I don't blame him. The idea of cashing out with millions personally would probably make me do the same thing. However, that's the one thing you've got to realise. If you go to VC's, you have got to read the contract, and try to imagine that the impossible could happen.
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
Each lecture seems to come in at about half a gig, although YMMV. Not something to download lightly, at least not on a common cable modem line.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I met Philip Greenspun a couple of years ago when Arsdigita was a growing company. He was (and probably still is) a very ambitious guy and told me that it was about time to do something and get into the Internet gig. Luckily, I decided to get an education first and had the opportunity to watch the bubble burst without being involved.
When the VCs got in, the management became greedy and Philip got out (or kicked out, whatever). The company's death, focussing on web tools, was more or less inevitable considering the sharp economic downturn and executives realising that they won't be raking in the profits with mere Internet presence (no matter what the technology behind it).
RedHat getting a number of experienced staff makes perfect sense since the web application services might complement their business with existing clients. And, it's all Open Source, in fact we might see more rapid integration of ACS with PostgreSQL, maybe it even becomes the development platform and won't have to be ported anymore (see http://openacs.org).
So, maybe it is a good thing after all, at least for web developers using the ACS.
Just my 2 Eurocents
I feel so sig.
Beats me why RH bought the company, when they could have brought in - openacs
Sure as shootin' OpenACS has much to do with the reason RH bought the company which made the original... not least because OpenACS is made to run with Postgresql (aka: Red Hat database).
But perhaps the client list was worth something, too, you think?
World Bank Global Development Gateway anyone?
That the VC culture eventually brought the company down is disillusioning (word?) but should provide a more useful object lesson than the big splash failures the press is usually so quick to jump on.
I am still optimistic, I think the web has space for start-ups who want to write good software, make good sites and provide good services...but it isn't easy and there are an awful lot of mistakes to be made out there....
Ironically we've done about six times more ACS work than ArsDigita has done this year, including beating them out for the Children's Hospital at Montefiore project, a really cool project which put our site, based on the ACS at every bed in the Children's Hospital, next to Plasma screens and wireless keyboards. We're stable, and growing, and have never had an employee leave the company since we started in 1998.
Also, we've been enhancing the ACS-Tcl steadily for the last year; it's a totally different project than what Ars Digita has for download -- more stable, faster, better features, etc. OpenACS is nice, but it's still all alpha code. And if you think their 4.X product works with Postgres, you haven't read very carefully. They've been releasing OpenACS 4.X sites on Oracle this year.
I'm the president of ybos, and yesterday felt like I was living a case study at HBS. "You own a growing boutique firm. Your major partner/sometime competitor was just bought out by a billion dollar company. What do you do?"
The point is that if you think you can grow a business yourself, do so - if you don't absolutely need a large amount of outside financing, don't take it. I understand that the VCs want you to take it so they can control the company, but that's why you need to first demonstrate that you can make some money - once that's been proved, you are in a much stronger position to negotiate. You can effectively prove that their returns will be high, and they should give you money at a good valuation, and not try to take control of a product that they don't really understand (at a detailed level, etc.).
Actually I think it gets rebooted ever 24 hours but has a bad machine in front of it... greenspun handed photo.net over to some friends of his and those remaining raj, lisa, and audrey and our soon to be new employee kyle are workign on the site. While aD has been :) (although we are not paying most of these folks)
"letting employees go" photo.net is hiring
so its still up and running totally separate from aD.
We just switched to running linux front end boxes combined with aolserver band arsdigita's oracle driver. we're having trouble with that combination. are there any other folks donig 8 million hits a day (with a lot of db hits) using linux combined with aolserver and the wonderful arsdigita oracle driveer. It seems like some pages keep on coming up blank. Maybe when we try solaris we'll have better luck.
We also have an exciting announcement soon with regard to retailers who are helping to support photo.net.
-raj
Althouh they released all of their early code via a GPL liscence, the vast majority (at least 95%) of the development was done by paid employees. Contrast that with a company like Redhat were the majority of the development is done by unpaid volunteers. Arsdigita therefore had all of the expenses of a closed source company, without the benefit of having proprietary assets.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think they should have kept their code closed source but they really missed out on not using what was at one time a very active development community to enhance their product.
He didn't understand why this was not a 'good idea'. The VC's wanted him out because he was/is a loose canon. How would comments like this have been interpreted by the World Bank?
philg@mit.edu went on to justify this by stating:
There is almost nothing else that needs to be said.
Judging from his more recent comments on his Ask Phillip bulletin board, he's mellowed out considerably since ArsDigita's investors bought him out. Apparently he's decided that he has better things to do with the rest of his life than complain about the sorry state of the computer industry.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Let's see. I joined aD in the summer of 2000 and worked there for about a year.
.5 - 1 year ago). Trust me. Red hat buys aD. What a waste of money. Inside word is that Greylock (investors of both) didn't want aD to look like a complete failure. (It really wasn't a complete failure. It was just another dot-com tragedy).
.5 - 1 year and dying is still dying. Basically I don't think their model worked (or it was stable enough to work in a poor economy (given the amount of cash they were burning)). Maybe that's why Ybos is still alive.
I think there are many many misconceptions about Arsdigita and Phil Greenspun that people get having not worked with Arsdigita. (Disclaimer: as an ex-employee I'm sure my views are biased too.).
1) Phil Greenspun was not a genius (as some people thought him to be). Don't get me wrong. He's extremely smart and he was good at writing books and giving seminars and that kinda crap that can get people excited about software. I met him personally and I, myself, was excited. In a nerd-to-nerd way he can be inspirational in making you want to be something more than you are. Part of Phil's problem is that he kind of has a chip on his shoulder. He's not a REAL MIT professor. All these claims of starting the business from $10,000 and other exaggerated claims are simply that: exaggerations.
2) Arsdigita is kinda like communism (as some might say). It's good on paper but doesn't work in real life. Sure there were the cars, (the hoes), the food, the money, the vacation houses, etc. I don't think anyone ever got hooked up with a ferrari. I don't think anyone really went to the vacation houses except for him and a select few. If anything, all these utopian ideas were part of the same gimick to hire more employees and give the illusion of his ability to run the "cool" internet company. He was using the same (dare i say) "marketing techniques" to promote ACS to show the "success" of arsdigita.
Having been there a limited time, my view is that aD was f0cked froma little bit of everything. It wasn't really the board that put aD into the dump (they just took them there slightly quicker). If anything was to be a main factor to their failure it was the economy (look around). So it's not one persons fault but a lack of demand. No clients = no company. I'm glad to see Ybos is still up, though. Go Ybos!
PhilG was, needless to say, not a people person. Simply put (as stated somewhere above) he wasn't a people person. He knew how to make people in the company f-ing pissed and a good number of engineers quit because of his being a "loose cannon". You can't have someone like that in control (you don't want nazi germany either despite the level of efficiency the achieved).
So lets review:
1) (before my employment ( summer'00)), there were already incidents with philg alienating aD employees. some good ones left. aD still had life.
2) (during employment (next year or so)), aD had already begun to die. I think this is the same for most internet companies out there. Back then nobody thought it was a recession but basically the economy (and demand) was basically coming to a halt. So what was left was a bunch of "business consultants" scrambling to get whatever they could.
3) (post employment) philg gets the boot. he actually gets the better end of the deal. they pay him $$$$$ to leave and go away. this is what makes me laugh. the business people were just so stingy to grab control of the company that they were blind in seeng that they were fighting for a lost cause. they basically paid him $$$ so they could lose more money. fools.
4) aD FINALLY dies. (it should've been dead
P.S. One more thing. You could go on to say that if someone else had run it has truly "open source" that it would've been still alive. Possibly. But living for another
(sorry admins. "accidently" clicked on to post anonymously. forgive the repost)
.5 - 1 year ago). Trust me. Red hat buys aD. What a waste of money. Inside word is that Greylock (investors of both) didn't want aD to look like a complete failure. (It really wasn't a complete failure. It was just another dot-com tragedy).
P.S. One more thing. You could go on to say that if someone else had run it has truly "open source" that it would've been still alive. Possibly. But living for another .5 - 1 year and dying is still dying. Basically I don't think their model worked (or it was stable enough to work in a poor economy (given the amount of cash they were burning)). Maybe that's why Ybos is still alive.
Let's see. I joined aD in the summer of 2000 and worked there for about a year. I think there are many many misconceptions about Arsdigita and Phil Greenspun that people get having not worked with Arsdigita. (Disclaimer: as an ex-employee I'm sure my views are biased too.). 1) Phil Greenspun was not a genius (as some people thought him to be). Don't get me wrong. He's extremely smart and he was good at writing books and giving seminars and that kinda crap that can get people excited about software. I met him personally and I, myself, was excited. In a nerd-to-nerd way he can be inspirational in making you want to be something more than you are. Part of Phil's problem is that he kind of has a chip on his shoulder. He's not a REAL MIT professor. All these claims of starting the business from $10,000 and other exaggerated claims are simply that: exaggerations. 2) Arsdigita is kinda like communism (as some might say). It's good on paper but doesn't work in real life. Sure there were the cars, (the hoes), the food, the money, the vacation houses, etc. I don't think anyone ever got hooked up with a ferrari. I don't think anyone really went to the vacation houses except for him and a select few. If anything, all these utopian ideas were part of the same gimick to hire more employees and give the illusion of his ability to run the "cool" internet company. He was using the same (dare i say) "marketing techniques" to promote ACS to show the "success" of arsdigita. Having been there a limited time, my view is that aD was f0cked froma little bit of everything. It wasn't really the board that put aD into the dump (they just took them there slightly quicker). If anything was to be a main factor to their failure it was the economy (look around). So it's not one persons fault but a lack of demand. No clients = no company. I'm glad to see Ybos is still up, though. Go Ybos! PhilG was, needless to say, not a people person. Simply put (as stated somewhere above) he wasn't a people person. He knew how to make people in the company f-ing pissed and a good number of engineers quit because of his being a "loose cannon". You can't have someone like that in control (you don't want nazi germany either despite the level of efficiency the achieved). So lets review: 1) (before my employment ( summer'00)), there were already incidents with philg alienating aD employees. some good ones left. aD still had life. 2) (during employment (next year or so)), aD had already begun to die. I think this is the same for most internet companies out there. Back then nobody thought it was a recession but basically the economy (and demand) was basically coming to a halt. So what was left was a bunch of "business consultants" scrambling to get whatever they could. 3) (post employment) philg gets the boot. he actually gets the better end of the deal. they pay him $$$$$ to leave and go away. this is what makes me laugh. the business people were just so stingy to grab control of the company that they were blind in seeng that they were fighting for a lost cause. they basically paid him $$$ so they could lose more money. fools. 4) aD FINALLY dies. (it should've been dead
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Your recollection of my comment about Slashdot is ALMOST correct (I'm glad someone in the room was listening anyway). I mentioned that the guys who wrote Slashdot weren't professional programmers but that they built a great site by carefully tailoring the software to the evolving users' needs. I mentioned that some people have thrown rocks at the way it was coded (but not me since I've actually never looked at it; I have enough trouble with my own source code!) but that it really doesn't matter since data model plus page flow are the only things that affect the user experience.
.NET or openacs.org, etc. It is much more relaxing to limit myself to teaching one semester per year at MIT (6.171; Software Engineering for Internet Applications -- to avoid the kinds of tool flame wars that one sees on Slashdot we don't mandate the use of any particular tools except an ACID-compliant RDBMS (practically speaking that means Postgres, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server)).
You must have caught one of my last one-day courses. I've stopped doing them because I think that enough people have heard what I have to say. The ideas are out there for anyone who needs them, either in a document I've written or in the heads of former students, users of photo.net, embodied in products such as Microsoft
I spend the rest of my time taking flying lessons (doing my primary training now, airplane arrives on March 1, starting instrument training in March, leaving for a 3-month Alaska trip on June 1). There is nothing quite so humbling as learning to fly. You show up at the airport and, with 60 hours of experience, are almost surely the most incompetent person on the property. If your instructor is "old-school" (mine is) there is an intermittent shouting in your headset ("more right rudder"; "what do you think you're doing?"; "don't you see where the nose is pointed?"). Everything is happening way too fast.
Anyway, flying sure makes arguments about the proper way to code up a Web script (which after all is simply merging the results of an SQL query with an HTML template) seem irrelevant. Every time you bring the airplane down in a crosswind you're putting your life and your passengers' lives on the line. Screw up a bit and you've got yourself a $228,000 pile of vaguely airplane-shaped scrap. Screw up more than a bit and you've dug yourself an airplane-shaped grave right on the runway.
Anyway I guess I should close by thanking the Slashdot guys once again for their great achievement in building this site. I often use it as an example to students of how one does not need or want too many collaboration areas on a site. Users need to be able to find the discussion. What I like about Slashdot is that one need only check the front page in order to see what is being discussed.