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ArsDigita Founder Responds to Closing
An anonymous reader sent in: "Net celebrity and ArsDigita founder Eve Andersson has written a brief history of the firm, documenting its downfall from her point of view. Fascinating reading, and yet another example of how a good thing can go so wrong."
Eve's story was an interesting read, and it's quite similar to the history posted by Greenspun. To make a long story short, greedy VCs drove an otherwise good company straight into the ground. Greenspun's account of the action has been removed, but a cached copy is at archive.org.
If you want to know what really happened, I'd say that a combination of the two journals is likely a good start.
Philip Greenspun's story (not surprisingly) agrees with Eve's, but provides a very different point of view.
He joined AD in April 2000. He became CEO in march 2001.
Was that so hard to infer from the article?
Just as note - within the company itself, Phil was widely known to be a bastard and an incompetent manager as well as a mediocre coder. Eve was basically known to be a joke. No one was particularly sorry when she left; when Philip left, people cheered. Note that, in her article, Eve compares the prosperity of aD before the dot com crash with the downfall of aD afterward; and blames it solely on the VCs. While I agree that the VCs have some hand in this, the basic reality is that companies like aD (no product, no strategy, no clue) do not fare well in the harsh climate of the "new new economy". I'd suggest taking Eve's rosy view of the situation with a grain of salt.
The reality is that the TCL version of ACS was abysmal. It did not scale in any reasonable way; it leaked memory like a sieve (we actually had to write a script to restart the server periodically), and it was a pain to use. Worse than that, the code was an ad hoc spaghetti mess, full of hacks that work around bugs introduced by other hacks. For example, a common joke among the developers was that any method prefixed with "philg_" could be replaced by the pseudocode "if(rand() > 0.5) crash();" Eve's own code was in the same league.
When the same people who wrote this monstrocity got their hands on Java, they made all the same mistakes -- hence, the failure of ACS-Java to accomplish anything remotely useful. The VCs are not the only ones to blame for aD's failure.
Anyone with an interest in Greenspun's ideas or the ACS should come over to OpenACS.org http://openacs.org where the FULLY GPL OpenACS 3.x and the (currently in late alpha) 4.x are developed and maintained by a talented global developer community and several companies.
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For general info read first: OpenACS FAQ
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Aolserver is the native webserver of OpenACS, but you can use Apache if you like
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Come check it out for yourself.
Eve characterizes Phillip Greenspun as being victimized by the evil VCs.
But according to her story,he was victimized to the tune of 7.6 million dollars from a company about to go fuckedcompany? Not so bad.
His story (see link above from solman) doesn't mention money changing hands, so what do you believe?
There were several ArsDigita offices throughout the world when the company began to contract (or implode) in the last half of 2001. The office I worked in was staffed by some of the nicest, smartest, hardest-working people I have ever enjoyed coding with. We wrote unit tests. We pair-programmed. We refactored. We were starting to create something that looked credibly like commercial software.
I have been told that even source control and release management were considered "fashionable but not really useful" back in the TCL era at AD, and that ACS users were expected to grab a tarball and start hacking.
Remember when you were a wet-nosed little code monkey and thought that grinding out twenty functional points over a sleepless weekend meant that you were "productive?" Forget that the code was too slow and buggy to be released, or that it was so over-engineered that every programmer who had to add to it or use it squandered countless hours figuring out the architecture.
Slowly, if you learned at all, you discovered that all the boring stuff you disdained at first enabled you to actually bring products to market in a repeatable, cost-effective way. (Oh yeah, and no 80-hour weeks debugging, either).
ArsDigita was just beginning to learn these lessons and grow up into a real development organization when RedHat acquired it.
I worked for aD back in 2000. Both the VC funding and Allen should be for 2000 not 2001, it's just a typo.
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
Still, for all its faults, building a website on top of ACS Tcl was a lot easier than starting from scratch with a web server and RDMBS. So there was and is (openacs.org) real value in the software. ArsDigita didn't so much 'give it away', more like they made it free software because there was no good reason not to. The sort of customer who'd pay for a proprietary boxed website-building product wouldn't want something in Tcl, they'd go for something more buzzword-compliant. Hence the venture capitalists' attempt to create a new ACS Java.
(There was actually an existing port of the ACS to Java, a straight translation from Tcl. It wasn't an unworkable monster like the aborted version 5.0, but certainly less successful than the Tcl version.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
My name is Terry Lorber.
So there.
I did a three-week boot camp at aD. They didn't
hire me, that might color my reaction.
I found that the culure of aD was dominated by
people who were self-righteous and arrogant.
This might possibly be b/c they're all from MIT.
They were generous in their help, but afterwards,
I felt dumb. Granted, I did meet some nice people.
Andersson et al. are such a bunch of cry babies.
They signed up for the $40M. They weren't forced
to go to the VCs. By all accounts, aD was doing fine
without the outside help. It was the founder's greed
that got aD into the mess.
To complain that people don't want to work more
than 40 hours a week is ludicruous. To brag about
one's performance review is shameless. While
Andersson's article started out well, it spiraled
into mudslinging at the end.
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