7 ms·

I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio emp

by rekoros 11y ago

I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years. I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my career) and worked on the original implementation of the Heavy Rotation feature. I walked around the office asking people "Does this look right? How about this?" I'd upgrade Erlang code in production by hot-reloading the heavy rotation module, and walk around some more. It was fun! In 2011, I realized that Rdio will never succeed due to lack of fanatical leadership—you can't have a company with absent founders, that's just not how it works—and left. I've been expecting this sort of an "exit" for a while. Today I work at my own startup (sameroom.io) and every single day I'm grateful for the Rdio experience—mostly as a cautionary tale, unfortunately. And now, we have to deal with this: "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old.

mbesto 11y ago
> "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old. Genuinely curious here - why are so many techies desperately passionate (both positive and negative) about choice of unseemly unnecessary tech products? I feel like there is this peculiar subculture of tech-minded folk who defend at odds their tech choices. "Slack is the best" "Hell no, IRC has been around for years!" "Let's fight!" I don't see any rational reason to "hate" on the success of a company or a brand...
- willtheperson 11y ago
  "I chose X so to validate my choice I will tell you why Z is the worst!" It happens everywhere. Some get more caught up in it (Video Game console, iPhone / Galaxy, etc.). Marketing tries to play into this a bit for free promotion. Make you feel intelligent for choosing them and you're part of a club so you'll spread their gospel.
- epa 11y ago
  The tech generation grew up in a 'free' culture of internet: illegal downloads, open source, pro bono collaboration. Paying for something that is equally equivalent to something that was free for decades usually is a tough sell. This doesnt apply to all people.
  - lemevi 11y ago
    This probably also explains why it's so hard to find a good editor. So many devs are totally unwilling to pay a decent amount for anything. Maybe the exception being hosting. Outside of hosting a server and dns and an SSL cert, it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life. Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10 a month for all their awesome (but very specialized) IDEs and people are going nuts over how much that is. It's nothing. But devs want to pay for very little. So we get shitty tools. Like vim[1] or atom[2]. Thanks I guess. Seriously can I have a generic text editor that's as good at editing as IntelliJ is at Java? [1] http://geoff.greer.fm/vim/ http://geoff.greer.fm/vim/ [2] https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins-so-much-potential-so-many-bugs/ https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins...
    - douche 11y ago
      ReSharper has been worth every penny that I've given them over the years for upgrades. Seriously, it amounts to one or two days' worth of salary for a software engineer. The break-even point is extremely low.
    - pyre 11y ago
      > it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life. On the flip-side, why invest all of your time become accustomed (possibly married) to an ecosystem that is beholden to someone else? Just because you spend $100 on VisualStudio doesn't mean that MS will take your input to heart when some manager "on high" decides to change direction with the product.
      - 11y ago
- frenchie4111 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
- rekoros 11y ago
  Well, in the case of Rdio vs Spotify, Rdio is way better, UI-wise. But that has nothing to do with our 15-y-o — she grew up with Rdio and it's the only streaming music service she's ever known.
- michaelchisari 11y ago
  It all goes back to Emacs vs VI.
- witten 11y ago
  As a dev, if you are tool-agnostic, then you're also productivity-agnostic.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  You have to keep in mind that this is a kind of game. Almost no one truly, really hates the other product. People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke. So for instance I'm in the IRC camp of group communication, and I'll go to great length to use it over Slack, but if you really need me to use Slack and it makes sense, then I'll use Slack. But I will be doing cynical jokes so that you won't forget I'm in the other camp :P.
  - rtpg 11y ago
    >People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke. Unfortunately, this can get out of hand, see systemd death threats. Hope people will learn to be nicer on the internet now that the general population is on it.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      That's not a product rivalry, that's a deeper upset with how systemd is handling things. Nobody thinks vim is trying to take over the editor space.
      - EwanToo 11y ago
        But I would hope you'd still think that death threats over it are utterly ridiculous, and unacceptable?
        Dylan16807 11y ago
        Yes.
  - paublyrne 11y ago
    People do get into fistfights over sporting rivalries, though, not to mention religious ones.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
- junto 11y ago
  It is basic human nature to polarise into distinct communities and take sides. Look at football teams. They wear different colours, have minor differences in ethoses but both play more or less the same game of football. Slack versus IRC is the same concept.
- snarfy 11y ago
  Tribalism is human nature. It's not rational. In a tribe, being rejected is pretty much a death sentence, so I can see why humans have a strong motivation to be in one. It turns irrational when that tribe is coke vs pepsi, xbox vs playstation, vim vs emacs, etc.
- GBond 11y ago
  Techies are generally idealist and strongly opinionated about stuff they think they know best.
invisible 11y ago
Speaking to the question you posed at the end: Having worked at Grooveshark I think Google Music is the obvious choice now that Rdio will soon be gone.
- tomclancy 11y ago
  I had Google Music for 6 months and, while their music selection is great, their UI is horrendous. For example if I'm scrolling through an artists albums, they would list every release of an album (European release, NA release, Japan release, extended version, radio friendly, non-radio friendly). Maybe that's nice for some? It was just a hassle for me. Overall navigation through the app I found to be really, really bad.
  - bmelton 11y ago
    I've never noticed that myself, but if you say it's a feature, I'll believe you, and applaud Google for doing it that way. As different album releases often contain different recordings, sometimes finding EXACTLY the song I want to hear is hard to do. Having fallen for Sublime when they were still playing live shows, but knowing that they were only able to capitalize on their fame after the death of their singer, they've (necessarily) released a bunch of versions of old songs, which are often vastly different from one another. Finding JUST the right recording of a particular song is only enabled by having that otherwise needless duplication in the selection process, and I'm certainly willing to endure that if it means being able to add every version of X to my queue to find just the one I was looking for. Offtopic, if they could only add Whitesnake's "Starkers in Tokyo" recording, I'd have just the right version of "Here I Go Again" in my library.
    - pyre 11y ago
      On the other hand, some people don't care about the several slightly different recordings or remixes of "Santeria" and just want to listen to Sublime? A good UI would allow for both rather than just point the firehose of information at the user.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
trustfundbaby 11y ago
> I realized that Rdio will never succeed due to lack of fanatical leadership—you can't have a company with absent founders, that's just not how it works—and left Can you elaborate on this? How was the leadership absent? and why do you think that was?
- rekoros 11y ago
  Rdio co-founders sold Skype (twice). When they co-founded Rdio, they weren't hoping to build their life's work, they just wanted to try something new (I guess), in the US. Rdio was run by VPs. That's OK when things are going great and there's lots of money in the bank. It's not OK when the ship needs some founder-inspired steering in a storm. It's not OK when the ship is taking on water. It's not OK if there are signs of mutiny. It's not OK if pirates are about to board. And it so happens that most startups tend to spend their lives navigating rough waters with not enough money in the bank and pirates in tow.
  - mavelikara 11y ago
    Did you have trouble hiring, given the bad rep the founders got when they fired some employees at Skype and pulled back their vested options? [1] [1]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-stock-option-plan-heres-why-they-did-it http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-s...
    - rekoros 11y ago
      When that news came out I personally became very aware of the absence of a real "Skype mafia", a la PayPal. It might be the old vs new world thing. I don't know for sure, but I don't think Rdio had any trouble hiring, ever, because it is(was) a service that people love(d).
  - GBond 11y ago
    Do you think lack of founder attention negatively impacted lack of progress on the partnership/BD side? Seem to be key in the market (Spotify with Starbucks; Pandora in-car app). Sad to see the "best" product in the market go under.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bmelton 11y ago
Offtopic, but thank you for starting (and linking to) sameroom. I just started noodling around with some code last week to bridge the messaging gap within my own company (we're supposed to use Lync, or Skype, or whatever it's called now, but nobody does because we've all used it), so we have a mish mash of users on a variety of networks, and I'm looking forward to using sameroom, and hopefully, get to abandon the code I was working on.
- rekoros 11y ago
  You're welcome! Let me know if you need any help with the setup. We're likely to build something that works with S4B (Lync) soon. Working on a Jabber bridge now, which is similar, deployment-wise.
stephenitis 11y ago
thanks for making sameroom.io, it's great irc -> slack & slack -> irc in less than a minute or two!
jbrad7354 11y ago
It's still unfortunate because this easily the best product in the market. They cared deeply about the experience... Vdio was a terrible decision though.

by rekoros 11y ago

mbesto 11y ago

> "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old. Genuinely curious here - why are so many techies desperately passionate (both positive and negative) about choice of unseemly unnecessary tech products? I feel like there is this peculiar subculture of tech-minded folk who defend at odds their tech choices. "Slack is the best" "Hell no, IRC has been around for years!" "Let's fight!" I don't see any rational reason to "hate" on the success of a company or a brand...

willtheperson 11y ago
"I chose X so to validate my choice I will tell you why Z is the worst!" It happens everywhere. Some get more caught up in it (Video Game console, iPhone / Galaxy, etc.). Marketing tries to play into this a bit for free promotion. Make you feel intelligent for choosing them and you're part of a club so you'll spread their gospel.
epa 11y ago
The tech generation grew up in a 'free' culture of internet: illegal downloads, open source, pro bono collaboration. Paying for something that is equally equivalent to something that was free for decades usually is a tough sell. This doesnt apply to all people.
- lemevi 11y ago
  This probably also explains why it's so hard to find a good editor. So many devs are totally unwilling to pay a decent amount for anything. Maybe the exception being hosting. Outside of hosting a server and dns and an SSL cert, it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life. Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10 a month for all their awesome (but very specialized) IDEs and people are going nuts over how much that is. It's nothing. But devs want to pay for very little. So we get shitty tools. Like vim[1] or atom[2]. Thanks I guess. Seriously can I have a generic text editor that's as good at editing as IntelliJ is at Java? [1] http://geoff.greer.fm/vim/ http://geoff.greer.fm/vim/ [2] https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins-so-much-potential-so-many-bugs/ https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins...
  - douche 11y ago
    ReSharper has been worth every penny that I've given them over the years for upgrades. Seriously, it amounts to one or two days' worth of salary for a software engineer. The break-even point is extremely low.
  - pyre 11y ago
    > it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life. On the flip-side, why invest all of your time become accustomed (possibly married) to an ecosystem that is beholden to someone else? Just because you spend $100 on VisualStudio doesn't mean that MS will take your input to heart when some manager "on high" decides to change direction with the product.
    - 11y ago
frenchie4111 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
rekoros 11y ago
Well, in the case of Rdio vs Spotify, Rdio is way better, UI-wise. But that has nothing to do with our 15-y-o — she grew up with Rdio and it's the only streaming music service she's ever known.
michaelchisari 11y ago
It all goes back to Emacs vs VI.
witten 11y ago
As a dev, if you are tool-agnostic, then you're also productivity-agnostic.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
You have to keep in mind that this is a kind of game. Almost no one truly, really hates the other product. People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke. So for instance I'm in the IRC camp of group communication, and I'll go to great length to use it over Slack, but if you really need me to use Slack and it makes sense, then I'll use Slack. But I will be doing cynical jokes so that you won't forget I'm in the other camp :P.
- rtpg 11y ago
  >People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke. Unfortunately, this can get out of hand, see systemd death threats. Hope people will learn to be nicer on the internet now that the general population is on it.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    That's not a product rivalry, that's a deeper upset with how systemd is handling things. Nobody thinks vim is trying to take over the editor space.
    - EwanToo 11y ago
      But I would hope you'd still think that death threats over it are utterly ridiculous, and unacceptable?
      - Dylan16807 11y ago
        Yes.
- paublyrne 11y ago
  People do get into fistfights over sporting rivalries, though, not to mention religious ones.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
junto 11y ago
It is basic human nature to polarise into distinct communities and take sides. Look at football teams. They wear different colours, have minor differences in ethoses but both play more or less the same game of football. Slack versus IRC is the same concept.
snarfy 11y ago
Tribalism is human nature. It's not rational. In a tribe, being rejected is pretty much a death sentence, so I can see why humans have a strong motivation to be in one. It turns irrational when that tribe is coke vs pepsi, xbox vs playstation, vim vs emacs, etc.
GBond 11y ago
Techies are generally idealist and strongly opinionated about stuff they think they know best.

invisible 11y ago

Speaking to the question you posed at the end: Having worked at Grooveshark I think Google Music is the obvious choice now that Rdio will soon be gone.

tomclancy 11y ago
I had Google Music for 6 months and, while their music selection is great, their UI is horrendous. For example if I'm scrolling through an artists albums, they would list every release of an album (European release, NA release, Japan release, extended version, radio friendly, non-radio friendly). Maybe that's nice for some? It was just a hassle for me. Overall navigation through the app I found to be really, really bad.
- bmelton 11y ago
  I've never noticed that myself, but if you say it's a feature, I'll believe you, and applaud Google for doing it that way. As different album releases often contain different recordings, sometimes finding EXACTLY the song I want to hear is hard to do. Having fallen for Sublime when they were still playing live shows, but knowing that they were only able to capitalize on their fame after the death of their singer, they've (necessarily) released a bunch of versions of old songs, which are often vastly different from one another. Finding JUST the right recording of a particular song is only enabled by having that otherwise needless duplication in the selection process, and I'm certainly willing to endure that if it means being able to add every version of X to my queue to find just the one I was looking for. Offtopic, if they could only add Whitesnake's "Starkers in Tokyo" recording, I'd have just the right version of "Here I Go Again" in my library.
  - pyre 11y ago
    On the other hand, some people don't care about the several slightly different recordings or remixes of "Santeria" and just want to listen to Sublime? A good UI would allow for both rather than just point the firehose of information at the user.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago

trustfundbaby 11y ago

> I realized that Rdio will never succeed due to lack of fanatical leadership—you can't have a company with absent founders, that's just not how it works—and left Can you elaborate on this? How was the leadership absent? and why do you think that was?

rekoros 11y ago
Rdio co-founders sold Skype (twice). When they co-founded Rdio, they weren't hoping to build their life's work, they just wanted to try something new (I guess), in the US. Rdio was run by VPs. That's OK when things are going great and there's lots of money in the bank. It's not OK when the ship needs some founder-inspired steering in a storm. It's not OK when the ship is taking on water. It's not OK if there are signs of mutiny. It's not OK if pirates are about to board. And it so happens that most startups tend to spend their lives navigating rough waters with not enough money in the bank and pirates in tow.
- mavelikara 11y ago
  Did you have trouble hiring, given the bad rep the founders got when they fired some employees at Skype and pulled back their vested options? [1] [1]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-stock-option-plan-heres-why-they-did-it http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-s...
  - rekoros 11y ago
    When that news came out I personally became very aware of the absence of a real "Skype mafia", a la PayPal. It might be the old vs new world thing. I don't know for sure, but I don't think Rdio had any trouble hiring, ever, because it is(was) a service that people love(d).
- GBond 11y ago
  Do you think lack of founder attention negatively impacted lack of progress on the partnership/BD side? Seem to be key in the market (Spotify with Starbucks; Pandora in-car app). Sad to see the "best" product in the market go under.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

bmelton 11y ago

Offtopic, but thank you for starting (and linking to) sameroom. I just started noodling around with some code last week to bridge the messaging gap within my own company (we're supposed to use Lync, or Skype, or whatever it's called now, but nobody does because we've all used it), so we have a mish mash of users on a variety of networks, and I'm looking forward to using sameroom, and hopefully, get to abandon the code I was working on.

rekoros 11y ago
You're welcome! Let me know if you need any help with the setup. We're likely to build something that works with S4B (Lync) soon. Working on a Jabber bridge now, which is similar, deployment-wise.

stephenitis 11y ago

thanks for making sameroom.io, it's great irc -> slack & slack -> irc in less than a minute or two!

jbrad7354 11y ago

It's still unfortunate because this easily the best product in the market. They cared deeply about the experience... Vdio was a terrible decision though.