Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
News

ArsDigita Shut Down 208

Posted by michael from the denouement dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

ArsDigita Shut Down More

ArsDigita Shut Down

Comments Filter:

  • ArsDigita University? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lwagner ( 230491 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:34AM (#2973580)
    Maybe this has been discussed earlier, but whatever happened to the people who were enrolled in Greenspun's ArsDigita University?

    Did that ever take off to any extent?

    • Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thenerd ( 3254 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:36AM (#2973588) Homepage
      ArsDigita university was wound up, although you can still access all the lectures on downloadable video (rm format I think), and the reading lists, etc. They will even send you a hard drive with all the lectures on, if you want to give yourself a CS degree =).

      Their web site is still up at aduni.org [aduni.org].

      thenerd
      • From their website:

        Video downloading has been suspended while we are being Slashdotted. Got a lot of bandwidth to spare? We would love to talk!

        doh! why must we always do this?

    • Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by abe ferlman ( 205607 ) <bgtrio@ya[ ].com ['hoo' in gap]> on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:40AM (#2973609) Homepage Journal
      The University happened and I attended it. There were some funding issues halfway through the year but they came through on their commitments.

      It was a great experience and I hope that the idea will be picked up again someday by another corporation that feels guilty about its sudden wealth.

      read about it at aduni.org [aduni.org] if you're curious. You can watch/download pretty much all the lectures on line, do the problem sets, etc.

      In fact, if someone out there is interested in mirroring about 40 gigabytes worth of video content from this server I believe that there is still a need for additional storage space.


      • In fact, if someone out there is interested in mirroring about 40 gigabytes worth of video content from this server I believe that there is still a need for additional storage space.

        Morpheus, dude.... Morpheus.

      • larger file size. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Alien54 ( 180860 )
        In fact, if someone out there is interested in mirroring about 40 gigabytes worth of video content from this server I believe that there is still a need for additional storage space.

        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.

        • 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.

          Especially considering that, even before they went belly-up, my average d/l rate for the lectures hovered around 3-6KB/sec (on a T-1). Half a gig for a 1 - 1.5hr lecture? Sure, mirror them if you can get permission, but convert them to a more sane format first.
          • You don't need permission to mirror them. They are under an open license. Of course it would be polite of you to request a hard disk instead of leeching the bandwidth, but there it is.

            Perhaps individuals would like to volunteer to host only one course each.

            Regarding a sane format, does anyone have any useful advice for converting realvideo files to a more sane format? I would love to hear how it is done. I have tried with very little success to convert them to mpeg (form which one could, presumably, convert them to quicktime/whatever).

            Bryguy

      • Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It was a great experience and I hope that the idea will be picked up again someday by another corporation that feels guilty about its sudden wealth.

        What? Why should one feel "guilty" about achieving success by offering some product or service of higher quality or at a cheaper price than competitors and still making a profit?

        • What kind of happy pills have you been taking? In the real world, success is achieved more often than not by screwing customers, exploiting employees, bribery, and violating laws whenever you can get away with it. Of course, it's kinda ridiculous to expect the same people who do that to be plagued by a bad conscience and donate their ill-begotten wealth to a good cause...

          • Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Someone has watched Wall Street too many times, I believe. Corporations are simnply made up of people. There's nothing mysterious that happens to these people, they just go into work each day and try to do their job as best as they can. Yeah, there's some assholes, but no more than there are in any large group. Get that chip off your shoulder.
            • they just go into work each day and
              try to do their job as best as they can.


              Exactly. Unfortunately, their job is, at the bottomline, to maximize profit, no matter what. These days, the "no matter what" becomes stressed more and more, since short-term profits that kill the company in the long term (such as fraudulent business practices) still translate into nice gains for the stock owners, who can just sell their shares when the shit hits the fan.


              Yeah, there's some assholes, but no more than there are in any
              large group.


              True, but a few assholes are all it takes. That's exactly the problem: big organizations remove the responsibility for large-scale actions from the majority of people. Five hundred employees are dutifully and and meticulously making sure than all regulations are met and the company's toxic waste all goes into the marked containers, and it takes just two or three to maximize profits by dumping it into the neares river instead of paying for proper disposal.

    • Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rbeattie ( 43187 ) <russ@russellbeattie.com> on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:44AM (#2973627) Homepage
      From aduni.org [aduni.org]:

      The goal of ArsDigita University was to offer the world's best computer science education, at an undergraduate level, to people who were otherwise unable to obtain it. ADUni.org is now a site run by alumni of the school seeking to carry on that mission.

      In 2000-2001, 34 talented and motivated college graduates attended a one-year, intensive, comprehensive undergraduate computer science program, for free. The program was an experiment in curriculum design, free education, and the effect of the Internet on the future of education. ArsDigita University was the brainchild of entrepreneur Philip Greenspun and the ArsDigita Foundation.

      After one year, ArsDigita University lost funding and was forced to close its physical doors. Yet, we prefer to think of the program as dormant, not dead. As we redesign aduni.org, we will continue to host all of our course materials and will provide as much information as possible about the workings of this past year - who we are, what we did, how we did it, what worked, what didn't work, and what we're doing now.

    • MIT CS in one year (Score:4, Informative)

      by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:00AM (#2973705)
      IT appeared to be a selection of MIT CS courses in one year, from the syllabi on the web. Many of the courses appeared to be little different from those at MIT (I took the MIT ones) and many of the instructors had MIT backgrounds. The AD course were taught in intensive serial fashion at a month each.

      My guess is the MIT OpenCourseware initiative wil put a similar range on the web in upcoming years. The first installment will be this autumn according to the MIT site. (If bore through MIT's online course catalog, many syllabi are already on the web.)

      The benefits of a MIT education, tempered by real-world experience, without the MIT prices, and without the MIT diploma.

    • Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:5, Informative)

      by chriscrick ( 127128 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @11:14AM (#2974141)

      We're still out here. The university itself closed its doors at the end of the academic year last July, and the alumni acted to save everything we could from the ashes. We run the aduni.org [aduni.org] site, as others have posted on this thread.

      All of our content (80 GB worth) is available online -- about 275 hours of lectures, problem sets, exams, notes, and solutions -- with courses like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (the much-loved MIT Scheme intro to CS course), Discrete Math, Algorithms, Theory, AI, Databases, and a couple of courses in Software Engineering (one of which is taught by Greenspun).

      But we're a shoestring alumni organization that can't afford the bandwidth to stream the videos very well, unfortunately. So as an alternative we'll ship an 80GB hard drive full of the stuff to anyone who wants one for $220. Everything's available under the Open Content License. E-mail me (chris@aduni.org [mailto]) for more details.

      Thanks.

      Chris

    • Was ADU ever accredited? If not, I see this as nothing more than busting ass for some certificates that are going to expire someday.

      Not to knock the valuable experience, but a university degree from an accredited college is worth a lot more in the long run than some crash course through what essentially appears to me as a one-year certificate program.

      It really amounts to all the classes for a major without any of the supporting classes (commonly known as BS classes) of a normal college community. I have issue with it being considered a "university" per se.

      So, in 5 years, are ADU "graduates" going to be able to get a transcript to get into grad school? I know I will be able to when I get out of UMass this June. :)
      • It was a certificate program from the start. Everyone in the program already had a bachelor's degree in something (it was an admission requirement- there were a few lawyers, doctors, and other advanced degree-holders in the mix as well).

        We didn't do it for the piece of paper. We did it because we wanted to know.

        Bryguy

  • photo.net is still around! (Score:3)

    by grammar nazi ( 197303 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:35AM (#2973586) Journal
    Well, at least photo.net is still around. This is Philip Greenspun's other venture.... a valuable resource for all things photography. Check it out.
    • It is gratifying to me that people still like photo.net and learn on the site (up to more than 1 million user-visits per month). But I also find it alarming that people blame me when the site is dead or slow. I was never an expert Unix sysadmin or Oracle dba. Being an MIT Lisp Machine programmer, I always hated Unix. I learned as little as possible about. As for Oracle, it is a wonderful tool with a great abstraction barrier (SQL) but I don't know of anyone who would say "I had a lot of fun last night administering my Oracle installation."

      If you thought the site was a pig in 1997 you can blame me because I was personally involved with some of the sysadmin/dbadmin stuff back then. But I'm retired now! I do the stuff that (a) is fun, and (b) that only I can do. So I write articles for photo.net and critique learning photographers' submissions to the image critique forum but I don't try to beat Unix and Oracle into submission. I drove to Nova Scotia for the entire month of September. I spent the rest of the fall in art museums, Civil War battlefields, and National Parks between Boston and Texas. When I got back from three solid months on the road, what did I find? Email from people blaming me for something that they didn't like on some Internet server somewhere.

      Rajeev and his merry band will eventually slay the sysadmin dragon and photo.net will be responsive once more. But when it happens you should thank him and not me!
  • WOW, Buzzwords galore on their website, no doubt they were trying to ride the DotCom bandwagon. I still cant figre out what it does, anytime I see, collaboration, enterprise content managment, Web content framework, Im assuming it something for people too stupid to write or autogen their own pages and automatically upload em, aka use rsync

    This isnt the univeristy document system that was suppsed to handle 100'000 of thousands of technical papers, automatic updates etc is It ?

    Why is redhat buying them ? Fixed assests ? All those juicy Oracle liscences ? Or the servers that refuse to be slashdotted ?...
    • "WOW, Buzzwords galore on their website, no doubt they were trying to ride the DotCom bandwagon. I still cant figre out what it does, anytime I see, collaboration, enterprise content managment, Web content framework, Im assuming it something for people too stupid to write or autogen their own pages and automatically upload em, aka use rsync"

      They made the ACS(ArsDigita Community System) and offered programming for it. It is currently written in java and runs under Aolserver. What is offers is:

      • message boards
      • user management
      • Ecommerce
      • Content management - that means having a whole system of library articles that can be edited through a web interface. That is the overlysimplified answer.
      • Intranet type functions
      • Ticket tracker
      • Much Much More

      That is just the short skinny on acs. It basically removes 3-5 months of programming an ecomm site. Kinda like Mason on steroids.

      Luckally OpenACS [openacs.org] exists for future ACS incarnations that do NOT use oracle for its database.

      So to answer no, it is not rsync and it is not for people that are "stupid." It is actually a lot of useful code. My guess is that RedHat is going to try and sell a website in a box.

    • The website wasn't always buzzword bingo. It used to be reasonably informative, although with some amount of Greenspun-style bombast (which you might think is worse). You can probably find some of the older content still on there, 'ACS Developer Journal' articles, tutorials and so on. The site developer.arsdigita.com [arsdigita.com] is where most of the info moved to.

      As Joel Spolsky suggests [joelonsoftware.com], you could take the decline in the website's usefulness as indicating the general health of the company.

  • `Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:3, Insightful)

    by yandros ( 38911 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:38AM (#2973601) Homepage
    Philip left ArsDigita a while ago.
    • It's his to the extent that he's the one who made it famous by taking 10 grand and turning it into 20 million in revenues. He left when he had a fight with the VCs about the companies direction.

      • Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It's his to the extent that he's the one who made it famous by taking 10 grand and turning it into 20 million in revenues.

        Many people, not just Philip, were responsible for this growth. And much of that growth was in spite of (not because of) his leadership. Philip is no hero. Think Steve Jobs writ small.

    • Ah yes - but without him it would never have existed. The scary thing is that if ArsDigita had avoided taking VC steroids to make them grow faster they probably wouldn't be collapsing now. Instead, we don't get to discover whether their model of providing source code and selling the service could have worked in the long term.

    • Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ArsDigita started because in that climate it couldn't possibly fail.

      Could the Slashdot posse please understand: you never met Phillip. He can't code (just READ the book and cut through the crap; analyze his 'facts'), and people who meet him instinctively dislike him. You can't run a company if everyone hates you.

      If you are still taken in by Phillip and Alex, try and find an old Tcl ACS. Read the code and try to imagine trying to extend it to do useful work. Imagine trying to maintain it. To work with Phillip's code is to hate Phillip. You don't even have to meet him.
      • Seemed like a nice bloke, fairly genuine, and with some "big picture" views.
      • I read Philip and Alex and all I could keep thinking is 'Christ this guy is a pompous ass'.

        It's clear, even in his writings, that his way is the right way, period. It's also clear that his biggest concern is getting money, to keep up with his friends, and he expects that the reader is also mostly concerned with money, instead of learning or doing something useful.

        • Judging from his more recent comments on his Ask Phillip [greenspun.com] 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.
        • What's wrong with being concerned with money? It's the oil which greases the wheels of our lives. It's the sine qua non of the pleasant life. With it, any man may be comfortable; without it, no man can be. Sure--it can be taken too far. But, so long as resources are limited, money is a necessity. To chastise one for wanting money is like chastising another for wanting air.

          Money may not buy happiness, but happiness definitely doesn't buy food for the table.

      • Greenspun may not have been the most pleasant boss (I have no experience of this personally) or the wisest possible businessman, but compared to the VCs and managers who took over the company he looks like Solomon. It's hard to credit the amount of sheer stupidity in the running of the company after the takeover. It must have taken some real effort to take a profitable, slow-growing company and turn it into a loss-making whale which didn't have any non-vapourware products.

        I think that this is a software equivalent of the Edsel story: be very wary of changing product direction solely for marketing and not technical reasons, to give customers 'what they say they want' (in this case Java). And don't let the engineers get sidetracked into building something horribly overengineered and way too complex (second system syndrome).

        I agree that Philip and co.'s code is crufty and difficult to maintain: but it's an absolute dream compared to the never-finished successor in Java. FWIW, the Tcl-based ACS is still being maintained as OpenACS [openacs.org], they have a port to Postgres (as well as Oracle) and the forthcoming version 4.0 is progressing nicely.

      • people who meet him instinctively dislike him.

        I've read his stuff, and I don't have to meet him to dislike him. What an arrogant ass.

        Yet another dot com scammer walking away with millions.

    • Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:5, Funny)

      by Seth Finkelstein ( 90154 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:57AM (#2973690) Homepage Journal
      The article has a (probably unintentionally) funny comment about that:

      The two sides settled out of court in June, and Greenspun gave up his fight for control. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Greenspun has since purchased an RV and an airplane.

      Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]

    • Thank you for pointing out the fact that my last day of influence at ArsDigita was in April 2000 (nearly two years ago). Here I am, a quiet retired schoolteacher, and people are still beating me up for opinions and attitudes that they think I might have had at some time in the preceding decade. I try to leave the old writings up on my Web site so as to be a good Internet citizen and not break links. But people take things that I wrote in the early 1990s and assume that I still hold these opinions. To take a non-controversial example: I struggled to get Windows NT 3.51 working and couldn't. I vented my rage against Bill Gates in some site. But now I love Microsoft. About half of my students use the .NET tools and are extremely productive. I'm running Windows XP on two computers at home and haven't spent more than 15 minutes on sysadmin. The interesting research in online communities is all being done at ... you guessed it, Microsoft Research.

      I'll come back home after walking the dog or get out of the bathtub where I've been reading New Yorker magazine. I amble over to the computer and there is email from someone yelling at me to "Get a life and stop picking on Bill Gates you miserable envious poverty-stricken grad student."

      Online communities only work if someone puts forth a strong opinion against which others can react. This is why photo.net works so well. We write "Nikon autofocus sucks" and that yields a huge pile of interesting comments from Nikon users about how they've been able to get great photos with the Nikon AF system. But when you have people with long memories and/or Google to dredge up these ancient opinions, which may never have been held strongly to begin with, life gets kind of confusing.
  • Is there any connection other than the similar-sounding name?

  • What I'd like to know... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thenerd ( 3254 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:45AM (#2973632) Homepage
    ...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 [arsdigita.com]) 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 [unicast.org], 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.

    • Re:What I'd like to know... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Philip was a poor leader. When the company was a "startup" he was able to personally hound people into working hard. That was OK, you expect it at a startup.

      But he has difficulty motivating people past a certain group size.

      The nadir of his managerial prowess came in a company-wide letter where he compared the act of writing good software to be similar to the killing of jews in hitler's germany.
      The analogy was bad enough, but the awful part was that he failed to see why this was offensive. And he got defensive.

      This is does not give worker bees much confidence in their leader.

      • The nadir of his managerial prowess came in a company-wide letter where he compared the act of writing good software to be similar to the killing of jews in hitler's germany

        I agree doing that is absolutely poor form (and kind of shows Godwin's law [tuxedo.org] to be true yet again), but Philip Greenspun is Jewish, so I guess he figured he wasn't going to be accused of being anti-semitic, given his stance on Israel, et al.

        thenerd.
    • I personally found greenspun to be a rather egotistical elitist. I can't say that I feel too badly for him either, as he made off a whole lot better than the employees who lost their jobs.

      Not everyone finds the whole Cambridge/MIT nexus to be appealing, much less a reason for existing as some folks do...

    • I do not know if it is skill...... (Score:5, Informative)

      by graemetheanalyst ( 557605 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @02:30PM (#2975403)
      ......but they certainly deliver results.

      I used to work for an investment web site that used Arsdigita. I was an investment analyst and was closely involved in specifying the site.

      Originally development was done by one of those web development company's that came out of nowhere to be worth billions at the height of the dotcom boom (I am sure every one knows the type). They failed to deliver anything that worked after months. The little that almost worked was overcomplicated (e.g. java applets to implement cascading drop down menus).

      When we switched to Arsdigita we had some pages working within weeks. These used data extracted from several different financial data feeds (which are complex) which was stored in database (which they also implemented) and content from a content management system (which they also implemented).

      I worked with them both to specify the site (what we wanted on what page, how to calcualte it, where to get the data from) and to debug it (they did the code, I did the financial maths) and I thought the process they used very efficient. Maybe be it is approach rather than, say skill at coding, that made them efficient the answer to the question may depend on how you define skill.

  • Careers... (Score:3, Funny)

    by bob@dB.org ( 89920 ) <bob@db.org> on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:47AM (#2973638) Homepage
    this is from http://www.arsdigita.com/careers/ which is linked to from the first page.

    ArsDigita is searching for energetic and accomplished individuals to join its expanding team. If you are:

    • Smart, motivated, business-savvy, and have been successful developing organizations into world-class corporations;
    • Eager to join a company that values learning, team and individual contribution, creative problem solving;
    • Passionate about Web-based collaboration and open source software;

    ...then we want to talk to you!

    Please surf our Web site to learn more about ArsDigita, its culture, and benefits. Then be sure to check out our opportunities.

    speaks volumes of the quality and/or "ease-of-use" for their "Web Content Framework", doesn't it :-)

  • Links to more information (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    See also this thread [openacs.org] on OpenACS [openacs.org] bboards for more info, and also Philip Greenspun's comments [greenspun.com]

    Twas a good thing - just remember, however greedy you get, never succomb to the temptation of VC

  • No Longer GPL'd (Score:3, Informative)

    by ryan1234 ( 173313 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:53AM (#2973666)
    ArsDigita switched to the ArsDigita Public Liscense [arsdigita.com] a few months ago when they released ACS 4.6. As you can imagine, this pissed off [openacs.org] many people in the community. However the folks at OpenACS [openacs.org] have ported ACS 3 and ACS 4.2 (both under the GPL) to Postgresql. Work continues, unabated by short-sighted VC's.

  • An unfortunate name (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Smith ( 305645 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @09:57AM (#2973684) Homepage
    So did they pronounce their name "Arse Digiter"?? If so, they wouldn't have had much of a chance in the British market...

  • Feel bad... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:04AM (#2973723)
    I know several of the early Ars Digita folk who Phil plucked out of MIT. I sympathize with Phil Greenspun greatly on this - though he's no longer actively involved in the company, it still feels awful to see your creation boom up and then pop. As he said in his post on his web site, though, you make 10 decisions every day as an entrepreneur and you can't second guess them all with 20/20 hindsight.


    My company, which grew over 2 years to 35 employees, raised 5 million dollars in venture capital, and was making over a million a year, slipped out of my control entirely earlier this year. We got an incompetent CEO put in place by our venture backers. Since we (the founders) had lost control of the board of directors there was nothing we could do about it. Of course, at the time, we needed the venture capital to fund development and attract good management, which we needed to close deals, etc. etc.


    Looking back on it, at almost every stage I made lots of decisions, but most of them were the right decisions at the time. The decision to take VC funding was unavoidable at the time - we were coming into direct competition with companies that had already raised 30 to 40 million dollars. Ironically, those companies went out of business long before we did because their burn rates were outrageous.


    Just my personal experiences anyway - I started out knowing a lot about technology and very little about business, and I know a lot more now. If your business if fundamentally sound without venture financing, then you don't need it. If your business is one that requires so much up front venture financing that you anticipate losing control (>50% of the shares of the company), before you get through the initial growth phase of the company, I would recommend rethinking starting that business, unless the returns seem outrageous. Use VC wisely, and only sell minority shares of the company during the early years. Once you get off the ground, you'll be in a much stronger position to negotiate for further funding anyway.

    • I know it seems unfair of the 'short-sighted' VCs, but you have to remember why they were in it. They gave you $5M and you had an annual turnover of $1M. Don't get me wrong, a $1M business is quite an achievement, especially in the current climate. However, from the VCs point of view they were looking at how long before they made the profits they were in it for. I don't know what sort of cash burn you had, but even if we're talking a relatively low figure and all profits were going to VCs, then they are still looking at 5-10 years even to pay back the original investment. Furthermore, this rate will cripple the company's growth and ensure that the $1M turnover is unlikely to increase.

      Vultures thought they are, it is understandable that they don't want to wait 1/4 of a century to even start making the profits they expected.

      They don't share your vision/commitment/hard work, they just see the bottom line. Once they see that they aren't making their profit fast enough they'll do whatever they can to get whatever they can. Now. They have no need to look to the company's future.

      Nasty? Yes. Unreasonable? Probably not.

      This time around, we're doing it without any funding - entirely organic growth. Yep, it's fscking hard, and very much hand to mouth. But at least we keep control, and if (when!) we make real money, it's not going to disappear into a VC's pocket.

      • Re:Feel bad... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:53AM (#2974025)
        Obviously nobody gives you 5 million bucks so you can make a million bucks a year. VC is intended to fund product development, marketing and sales efforts to increase your revenues. That's not the point - the point is that the VCs often times force in management that doesn't understand the business. I'm not promising the company would have been successful with different management, but I'm promising that with the management put in place the business could never have succeeded.


        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.).

    • Re:Feel bad... (Score:5, Informative)

      by smagoun ( 546733 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:39AM (#2973920) Homepage
      The parent is correct. I used to work for the company he founded. Although I didn't have nearly as much contact with our VC's as he did, I'm convinced that a lot of the bad decisions that hurt the company were pushed down from the VCs. They really are vultures, driven by their desire for a 1000% ROI within the first 2 years of their investment. They don't give a shit about you. Read that again. They don't give a shit about you. They're investors, and they care about their money. That's all.

      My experience at the parent poster's organization is a stark contrast to my experience at another employer, which was privately financed from the start. We didn't have the luxury of $5 million in the bank - our revenues had to support us. We didn't get fancy hardware, expensive chairs, catered lunches, or any of the other usual dotcom goodies. Most importantly, we weren't bloated with extra people sucking on our payroll. Instead, we busted our butts with what we had and got by on the bare minimum. We made our own decisions, and at the end of the day the company was sold to another one. VC's didn't get a dime, and the employees were very well compensated.

      While it's much more difficult to survive without venture cap funding, it's worth it. You make your own decisions and don't have to kowtow to the whims of VC's - none of whom know your business as well as you do. Take as little funding as possible from the VC's. Dip into your savings, take a bank loan, hit up your friends + family. Don't hit up the VC's. You're the one taking a risk, shouldn't you be the one making the decisions and reaping the rewards?

    • Re:Feel bad... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Friday February 08, 2002 @11:04AM (#2974080) Homepage
      Use VC wisely, and only sell minority shares of the company during the early years.

      Well, that was Greenspun's plan as well. The cofounders sold a small stake in the company to two VC firms in exchange for two seats on the board. Two board seats would not normally be enough to exercise control. However, there were several board positions left unfilled at the beginning, and appointment of new members had to be approved by the existing board members - so the two VC board members plus the chief exec. they appointed managed to get effective control with a minority stake. A 'shareholder agreement' and Delware's company laws (which I'm told favour management rather than shareholders) enforced this.

      I guess the lesson is: be very very careful, check for loopholes, and be suspicious if you're asked to incorporate in Delaware rather than a state with more shareholder-friendly regulations.

    • In times such as these, a VC firm run by techies would be very useful. It should have a clear policy about supporting the founders, when shares are sold etc., so that people like you and me could build a business without the feeling that some VC vultures might suddenly stab us in the back with a decision that ruins everything ...

      I bet there is plenty of capital in the hands of the right people (techie entrepreneurs who have built successful businesses - Jobs, Gilmore ... ) and they already invest in interesting projects. I'd really like to see some cooperation among them to support more business ideas that are based on interesting technology.

      • As much as I generally dislike the VC scene, I have to defend them to some extent. You have to think about it from their point of view: You are giving a group of people several million dollars of your own money, or someone else's money that contributed to the fund. An extremely high proportion of people end up failing, so you want to make sure these guys don't just piss all your money away.

        Now, take that to its logical conclusion... you are going to become a control freak, insisting that these guys (who are probably going to fail anyway) bring in "experts" who have succeeded in the past, insist that a plan be in place, make sure that they aren't making stupid decisions, etc.

        The VC game is really hard. I don't like it, but I sympathize with the fact that they are damned if they do (just hand the keys to the lunatics, and watch them piss it away), and damned if they don't (keep control, and prevent possibly competent people from doing their job).

        • That's all very valid, it's their money, their responsibility for it etc. - however, I find it unacceptable when they effectively destroy a project/a company by selling to a competitor or someone who is only interested in IP or the brand.

    • Re:Feel bad... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Reality Master 101 ( 179095 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <101retsaMytilaeR>> on Friday February 08, 2002 @01:01PM (#2974837) Homepage Journal

      We got an incompetent CEO put in place by our venture backers.

      Word. I raised $4.5 million, later another $15 million, only to watch the company that I and my partner built slam into the ground with a huge crater. At the time, it seemed like a good idea to bring in a CEO "with experience", but the guy was utter, total fool. He bought into every dot com cliche you can think of, including "spend as much money as possible to create an illusion of a large company so we can go public".

      It's a much longer story that this, but one of the lessons I learned is that I should have trusted my own business instincts and not assumed that some "gray hair" is more competent than me.

      I agree with you: there are VERY few scenerios where you "need" big VC capital. In fact, I think it's almost a disadvantage. It's SO easy to get into a mode where you waste money just because you have it. As you saw, the money ended up being a curse to your competitors. I think that's true more often than it isn't. The only way to use money like that is to sock it away and pretend it doesn't exist until you REALLY need it. Frugality shouldn't end just because you have money in the bank.

    • Am I the only one who feels a but funny about taking business advice from someone who a) is named Fnkmaster and b) links to a Flash site in his comment header?
    • I sympathize with Phil Greenspun greatly on this - though he's no longer actively involved in the company, it still feels awful to see your creation boom up and then pop.

      Don't cry too hard. I'm sure the amount of money he made on the deal more than compensates for that.

    • The decision to take VC funding was unavoidable at the time

      Why was it unavoidable?? I keep hearing all of these things that were unavoidable, that we couldn't do. The VC funding was not unavoidable.

      companies that had already raised 30 to 40 million dollars. Ironically, those companies went out of business long before we did because their burn rates were outrageous.

      So one could almost assume from your statements that getting more VC money would have ran you out of buisness faster?? Back to what was unavoidable, had you not recieved the VC money what would have been the worst scenario?? Your buisness fails earlier??

      The Dot.com boom was all about look at how rich my neighbor is getting. You took the VC funding to try to build your big important buisness. You want to be a Microsoft, an Oracle.

      Oddly enough, most of the Dot Commies were so focused on the carrot, they never saw the stick. "I don't need to read this do I??" I personally don't understand why a company of 35 needs 5 Million in cash to begin with. There are advertising expenses and such, and I know waht all of the excuses work out to be.

      The reality of it is that someone sat in their bedroom and wrote a program/built a website/used buzzwords in a fascinating manner. Now they believe that they must have 5 Million to advertise their Programming Firm/Design Comp./Consulting outfit. Well, 4 Million for advertising, 1 million for Aeron chairs. (Actually, all of those Aerons might have been the best use of VC money.)

      Finally, these geeks wouldn't take an economics class in college, and now are convinced that they can run a multi-million dollar company. Well, the VC's didn't believe it either, which is why all of that money was generally tied to "as long as you're not in charge."

      This is just another playing of the tortoise and the hare. Perhaps without that VC you would not have gone as fast, but you might have finished the race. My company is not Microsoft, but we're still around, and we're 2 years in the black. I can not think of a single competitor in the area who has survived the meltdown. I can think of 3 that tried hard to buy me with VC money, and they're out of buisness right now.

      We turned down any and all VC funding. The only funding we have ever had is $60,000 in loans from my in-laws. (Paid Back, but I still owe them for my Kitchen Renovation...)

      And honestly, we are well positioned for a market rebound. We have a longer development cycle due to fewer employees, but we are far more speculative in our products, and so generally have the luxury of being the first to start.

      Just like Enron, you keep you money in because you're greedy and you don't think you can lose, and then you're mad becuase noone explained it was possible to lose.

      Apologies to the original poster. I've gotten a bit off-subject, and I am not trying to indict your past. But remember, there are very few things in this world that are truly unavoidable. Next time do yourself a favor, just list the VC funding as a biggol' mistake so people aren't fooled into thinking there's a way to win at that game. "They took all of my money in Vegas, I should have hit on the 5." No, you should have avoided Vegas.

      ~Hammy
      Pissing you off on Slashdot for over 5 years!
      Now where's that Tom Christiansen punk!?

  • "The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Greenspun has since purchased an RV and an airplane". So at least we know he did OK! Beats me why RH bought the company, when they could have brought in - openacs [openacs.org]
    • one theory- they had *lots* of aeron chairs :)

    • 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 [developmentgateway.org] anyone?

      • Well, I manage the OpenACS project, and none of us have heard anything from RH that would indicate that our presence has anything to do with the decision. Let me amend that, AFAIK none of us have heard anything at all from RH. I can't think of any reason why there'd be a connection, RH buying aD doesn't affect the OpenACS project one way or another.

        aD's path was totally separate than ours, after all, once they dropped ACS/Tcl in favor of Java.

        I think the client list is indeed the key thing RH is buying. As you mention, the World Bank is certainly a large, high-profile customer.

        Something is missing from this thread that should be said. Whether or not you like Philip, his writing, his photography, or his software a lot of interesting and fun people have been attracted to the stuff he does. Photo.net's been a vibrant community for years, and aD, despite its flaws, spawned a vibrant community of its own.

        So ... thanks for that, Philip. No one can take that away from you.

        And ... best of luck to all those aDers who have lost, or are losing, their jobs as a result of aD's demise.
  • 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
    • Mea culpa. I shouldn't have advised you to get into the Internet craze. I started loving the Internet because it lets people learn from other people. That was back in 1976 when I began using ARPAnet. And what is amazing is that I can still wonder in 2002 at how useful Internet is. For example, I've learned so much lately from other pilots whom I've met on the Internet and could never have connected with as a practical matter otherwise. One of my interests is in getting a Stemme S-10 motorglider. They build 18 per year for sale worldwide. None are based in the Boston area. But I found the owners and their impressions of the aircraft on rec.aviation.* groups (thanks to dejanews (Google Groups now), of course). Then I emailed them and they were very helpful to me, despite my status as a novice pilot.

      At the end of the 1990s this wonder turned into something more akin to fever. And, along with the pressures that come from managing a company that was growing 1000%/year, that didn't bring out the most attractive parts of my personality. Bottom line: I'm sorry for giving you unsolicited career advice. If you come to the US and you don't value your life too much, I'll take you up on a sightseeing flight! (with Alex in the back seat, of course)

      [And don't sell Internet apps short just yet. With some improvements in infrastructure, such as ubiquitous high-speed wireless IP connectivity and reasonable conversational speech recognition software, a lot of interesting new applications should be enabled. Of course, it might be 5 or 10 years before we have this infrastructure in place, which is why I'm working with young people at MIT instead of trying to build the stuff myself.]
  • According to the article mentioned in the post, the acting CEO of ArsDigita was a venture partner of the Greylock firm [www.greylock]. Greylock is also an investor [redhat.com] in Redhat.
    • I wouldn't say it is a "shell game" necessarily. (Although it could be.)

      I work for a large, enterprise class software company. In the recent past we were looking for a tool to help us "wireless-enable" our product. We were turned on to a company called ILT which did handheld development and had a standalone handheld product.

      During our initial meetings with ILT, they let us know that they were being bought by a company that manufactured a handheld computer--Icras [icras.com]. Okay, makes sense right?

      It turns out that Icras was a venture funded incarnation of a company that first developed its own OS and hardware and was looking for applications to be ported to their platform. ILT, in turn, was funded by the same firm, but was not expanding at the rate the VC's were looking for. The VC's paired the two firms to consolidate their investment and reduce their risk.

      So, indeed the VC were shuffling things around, but in this case it seemed to made good business sense. This is why I hesitate to deem it a shell game; however, Icras went out of business, and ILT--now Akula Software [akulasoftware.com]--bought it's own intellectual property back at auction (I think it went for $1) and is back in action.

  • VC's (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Arimus ( 198136 )
    As someone who is involved with a group of ex-engnieers with a large company now starting our own firm I wonder what VC's are thinking of when they remove control from the founders - as the only people who know our code and the direction its going in removing us would be rather futile - yes I know other ENGINEERS would understand our direction but that's not the point. Our company is our baby and yes my financial input isn't to anywhere near the VC level but my risks (IE no job,money or house) are just as bad - we're as determined as they are to see our company succeed.. and I'm sure this goes for other startups as well - LEAVE THE FOUNDERS IN PLACE if you want your ROI to be as good as promised.
  • I have always had pretty high regard for PG. His book on web publishing, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, was one of the first that made real sense to me as it went beyond the obvious "a paragraph tag doesn't need a close paragraph tag" and talked about the how and why of information management/architecture. Sure ArsDigita was a company with no lack of ego and resources to start with (its hard to feel sorry for someone who can afford Oracle for their 'hobbies') but I admired the way they made the company come together with little corporate backing at the start and what seemed to be a pretty sound business plan. I always felt like AD was making its money off the right things,to start with a sound fundamental understanding of the meduim.

    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....

  • acs uses aolserver, rumours were around aol buying out redhat, redhat bought arsdigita (and acs). is there any link?

  • So, advice from the slashdot community? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by watanabe ( 27967 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:53AM (#2974024)
    My company, ybos.net [ybos.net] is pretty much the number one ACS-Tcl company right now. We picked up the ongoing development of Ars Digita's Tcl platform a year ago when they dropped it for java, and have continued to enhance it. According to f*cked company, the java port is going away now that RedHat has bought it.

    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?"

    • 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.


      Wait, it's alpha code unfit to sneeze on -- but they've been releasing sites on it? I guess you must feel pretty marginalized with way more people involved with openacs than with ybos's pseudo-fork of the acs, but don't let that drive you into making statements that just make you look foolish. :/ Sure, the postgres code is still alpha, but that's a hell of a lot more sql than "ybos" has released to the community -- postgres OR oracle.

      • Ouch! I didn't say it's unfit to sneeze on, and no, we don't feel marginalized. If you want to see the sort of work we've been doing, why don't you come by our site? www.ybos.net/kudos [ybos.net] Or, you could talk to our clients, and see why they picked us.

        There have been a number of instances where we've tried HARD to release our code in a venue where it will have good impact. I'd point you to the scramble that originated when we suggested to aD that we host CVS and bboards for ACS 3.4 about a year ago. People like Don and Ben were dismissive until they realized there was real demand for someone to continue to maintain that codebase. They then scrambled to have openACS take control. End result -- no result. Too confusing for aD, us and openACS to get something out the door.

        We have the same problems any growing company does that's self funded -- we don't have unlimited resources to throw at community interaction, support, etc. When aD wanted to provide that community support, we released all our code through their channels. That's no longer a good venue to release our code, and so we're revamping our developer section to provide just this functionality to the community. But, it takes time.

        If you want a copy of our most recent ACS, just drop me a line, or info at ybos dot net, someone will send you our source tree with enhancements. At any rate, there's no reason to be rude. I wasn't rude to you.

        • had to google for it, but I found it. (ah, for the days when .net denoted ISPs...) you're going to think I'm being rude again, but you really should hire someone with some aesthetic taste. i did check "developers" for some trace of this New And Improved Ybos ACS, but didn't see anything. just some 3.x modules.

          and re being rude, you don't think FUD like "And if you think their 4.X product works with Postgres, you haven't read very carefully" counts?
        • Actually, Peter, ACES 3.5 [sussdorff-roy.com] is alive and well, and just made available recently by Malte Sussedorf.

          It includes a bunch of stuff I (Don) did for Sloan last summer. Malte's an ex-AD, now OpenACS guy, just in case
          you're so out of the loop that you don't recognize his name.

          We weren't "dismissive", then "scrambling to take over". We made no attempt to "take over", we're too busy with our own projects. Instead, we worked to facilitate getting those who care organized. Which, thanks to Malte, has happened. The fact that you're unaware of it says something about your lack of help with the process.

          Our community gives plenty of support for people using the older, Oracle-only versions of the toolkit. Of course, we also help those who want to move to the OpenACS 4 platform, which supports both Oracle and Postgres., as well as our older, Postgres-only version.

          There are several consulting companies doing ACS Tcl work, most who have either switched or are switching to OpenACS. I have no idea if Ybos is larger than any of those companies, but clearly you play a minor role compared to all of them put together.

          OpenACS is a great example of how small businesses can cooperate in a way beneficial to all of them, by collaboratively working to improve a piece of software used by all. We work together, on occassion drink beer together, and of course at times compete against each other.

          And what path does Ybos take? You seem to be going out of your way piss off those companies participating in the OpenACS project. Do you think this will help Ybox in the long run?

          And, for the record, I know of at least three production sites running OpenACS 4/PostgreSQL.

          Yes, it's true that until a couple of months ago it wasn't ready for prime time, and it's true that we've not cut our first offical release yet. That's largely because aD releases were so buggy and unusable that we've decided to take a very conservative approach.

          I don't know where you get your misinformation. If you were an active part of the community of ACS/Tcl users, like each and every one of the other small companies specializing in such work, you'd be better informed.

      • We at ee-bose [ybos.net] been pushing really hard for several months to support ourselves and our families and have turned out tons of great code. I have only now been released from the site-mills for a few days to work on pulling this stuff together so that we can share it with y'all. We're very proud of our code, and will gladly share.

        I would love to be more of a part of OpenACS. I think they're doing great stuff, and I hope our work furthers the effort. But we can't devote the resources we'd like to to it.

        Anyway, stay tuned for some kick-ass enhancements, including an ACS that plays well with Oracle 9i, and utilities to migrate from 8i to 9i.

    • and it's definitely not beta software. It's just the new 4.x that's still alpha. New versions don't always spring fully grown from the forehead of another corporation that did all the work... tho i guess that's the only model ybos has used.
    • "ybos. We make technology easy."

      Couldn't you at least make pronunciation of your company easy? Which is it, 'why-boes', 'yibboes', 'e-boes', or 'why-bee-oh-ess'?

      ?
  • One of arsdigita's largest failures was not fully embracing the open source model. In my opinion they had the worst possible combination of open source code and proprietary products (from a company perspective, not a community perspective).

    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.

    • Amen. After the VCs took over the new management had a couple conference calls in which they invited the community to comment. People were very eager to contribute, but aD was absolutely intent on keeping all development in-house and completely hidden from the outside. Basically it appeared they considered the developer community built around ACS a headache. Here's what I wrote around that time (April 2001) on an aD bboard [arsdigita.com] following a developer meeting in San Francisco:
      The aD and OpenACS (Ben Adida) presentations were informative. Unfortunately it appears that ACS5 and OpenACS4+ are on divergent paths (I add the + as OpenACS4 isn't simply a PostgreSQL port as OpenACS3 was, OpenACS developers are doing considerable design on things like database independence). I believe Ben said that aD and OpenACS people are talking, though we could end up with two products, and that wouldn't be a bad thing.

      I think two divergent products would be a bad thing. The developer community is small. I'd like to be able to take a package from aD, OpenACS, or a third party and port it to my particular ACS installation with minimal effort. Given that Tcl and Java versions will exist for the forseeable future, I suppose this means at least keeping the data models in sync. Preferably the SQL queries would also be common across Java and Tcl for a given database.

      I hope that OpenACS developers don't do too much design and innovation within OpenACS, as it will only duplicate efforts from aD in the same problem space. The ball is really in aD's court here. It can open up all phases of the ACS5 developement process (that means now) and leverage the developer community, which I think will make ACS5 as well known and widespread as Apache (in a much smaller niche obviously), or it can see interacting with outside developers as a cost, increasing its long term engineering costs and descreasing the value it can provide to clients.

      "Core" products are what the open source community does best. Consider the Linux kernel versus free word processors. The kernel is wildly successful, while open source word processors haven't been adopted despite several good efforts.

      aD should learn from this and leverage the community to develop core ACS functionality. aD provides value to its customers through applications built on top of ACS (whether it be for hire or through licensing of future proprietary packages), not through developing ACS.

  • Phil Greenspun's version of the litigation story (Score:5, Informative)

    by anomaly ( 15035 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [3repooc.mot]> on Friday February 08, 2002 @11:36AM (#2974278)
    The story is no longer on the web, nor is it in google's cache but it is available from the wayback machine [archive.org]

  • Improved software engineering through genocide (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08, 2002 @11:45AM (#2974363)
    Philg sent a company wide memo comparing the nazi extermination of the Jew's to a software engineering project. Anyone who still is in his cult of personality needs to read this to understand how the man thinks.

    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?

    "On to Prague... Just NW of the city is Therezin, a good illustration of the power of documentation. During WWII the entire town was turned into a concentration camp for Jews. The Red Cross was invited in periodically to inspect the camp and found that everyone was happy and enjoying life in a little self-governing Jewish municipality. The Red Cross didn't dig too deeply or go anywhere without an SS guide. Eventually the Red Cross lost interest and the Germans were free to send virtually all of the Therezin Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz,

    Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen. The killing of 6 million Jews was like a software product. It ran
    continuously, was expensive, and involved a lot of messy details (where to find trains, coping with complaints from neighbors about the smell of burning flesh 24 hours/day, what to do with all the hair shaved off prisoners' heads (mattress factories were built and many Germans slept for decades after the war on human hair), etc.).

    Theresienstadt is like documentation. It was used by the appointed experts (CTOs) to evaluate the quality of the Nazi's concentration camp system for Jews (Germany's product). It was used intermittently for awhile and once everyone was happy with the program it was no longer used.

    Bottom line: by maintaining a city for a few tens of thousands of people, the Germans were able to convince the world that the concentration camp system was just fine. Therezin was about 1% of the effort of the overall Final Solution but it turned out to be well worth it."

    philg@mit.edu went on to justify this by stating:

    "It has been tough to write 5000+ pages of memorable hard-hitting writing on behalf of ArsDigita, particularly when the subjects (computer science, computer programming, software document) are of no inherent interest to 99.9% of the human race. So one would expect some bugs (paragraphs that could be misinterpreted) in 5000 pages of writing or code."

    There is almost nothing else that needs to be said.
    • It's not in great taste, granted, but it's not evil. (What the Nazi's did WAS evil, but that's not the issue here.) If I received the intial email I'd be disgusted but would be satisfied with the admission that it was "a bug" in his writing for the company.

      After the stench wears off, the point he makes is pretty clear (and valid) -- a 1% side track from the main thrust can make all the difference.

      Also: I'd assume everyone at aD was familiar with PG's writings (Travels, Philip and Alex, Heather Has Two Mommies, Career Guide, etc.) and such an off-the-wall, over-the-top analogy would be understood as such. Now, if the same article was written by Larry Elison...that'd be completely different. Completely.

    • Well, aside from the question of taste (I, for one, think you can find a good side in this--it is an excellent reminder of what can go wrong with things like "Red Cross inspection of concentration camps", etc), it also gives you interesting insight into how Greenspun views documentation--you can have anything the hell you want going on in engineering, build a completely different product if you want, as long as you make the documentation pretty.

      So, if you are ever evaluating something this guy is running, make sure you don't let the SS guide you around. Ask for code examples that implement the documentation he tries to foist on you and reserve the right to do some random audits/unguided investigation...

      It would be an interesting exercise to figure out how you would get around the "SS guides" if you were looking at a company and trying to evaluate its product.
  • Dont get me wrong. I've greatly enjoyed PG websites, books and photos. However, his attitude comes across as "I'm so much smarter than everyone else" when creating his web design business and his computer school. This attitude, which was pretty common at MIT and in the dot.com era may be good for getting new ventures started, but not for sustaining them. We all got to work together sometime.

  • A POV from an ex-employee (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 .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.

  • A POV from an ex-employee (again, sorry) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FreshFunk510 ( 526493 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @02:02PM (#2975216)
    (sorry admins. "accidently" clicked on to post anonymously. forgive the repost)

    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 .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.
  • I want to know what Eve Andersson [eveander.com] will be doing now that ArsDigita been sold...

    I suppose that hiring her as my personal masseuese isn't very realistic.

    steve

Slashdot Top Deals

"Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like `Psychic Wins Lottery.'" -- Comedian Jay Leno

Close