D is dead (was: Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.)

Neia Neutuladh neia at ikeran.org
Tue Sep 4 15:32:57 UTC 2018


On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 14:23:33 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> The first search engines were created in 1993, google came 
> along in 1998 after at least two dozen others in that list, and 
> didn't make a profit till 2001. Some of those early competitors 
> were giant "billion dollar global companies," yet it's google 
> that dominates the web search engine market today.
>
> Why is that? Well, for one, resources don't matter for software 
> on the internet as much as ideas. It's not that resources don't 
> matter, but that they take a back seat to your fundamental 
> design and the ideas behind it.

Google had a $100k angel round in 1998 and a $25 million Series A 
in 1999. The difference between Google and the $12 billion-ish 
valued Lycos of the time was not insurmountable, yes, but $25 
million was enough to hire dozens of developers, lease offices, 
and buy the hardware they needed.

Similarly, we don't need Google-level funding to produce a 
developer ecosystem that's sufficiently polished not to be a 
blocker for corporate VS-only types who rely on autocomplete. But 
we need a bit more than $4k for that, or it's always going to be 
someone's personal project that's mostly complete but might be 
abandoned in six months.


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list