5 ms·

I hope this isn't true. Having worked at/on multiple competitors I have nothing but respect and admiration for the work the RethinkDB team has done to make a gr

• nine_k 10y ago
  Ever thought what do these salespeople do in a software company? This is what happens when salespeople fail to do enough of their thing. Sales are essential for a for-profit company.
  • geofft 10y ago
    So, maybe we should find a way to develop good technology that doesn't involve for-profit companies?
    • hueving 10y ago
      Non profit companies still need to make money to keep the lights on. That means targeting technologies that can attract lots of donations. Databases are a very mature technology so the number of companies running into issues with them is vanishingly small. Who is going to donate to a non profit spending its time developing a solution a problem almost nobody has?
      • geofft 10y ago
        I don't know, I feel like lots of people donate to universities to spend their times solving problems that almost nobody has. Or maybe they don't, but somehow that money still exists. How does that work? Why are we assuming that everything has to be done by companies? What if we establish a National Science Foundation for fundamental CS research?
        • jhugg 10y ago
          If you’re not getting paid by your users, then you often get something cool, but maybe not something you want to go to production with.
        • sbuttgereit 10y ago
          Or maybe they don't, but somehow that money still exists. How does that work? This isn't that difficult of a question. 1) Universities get money from the students who pay tuition and fees for their education. 2) Universities get money from wealthy benefactors who donate their money to a cause they believe in. 3) Universities get money from for-profit companies that have sufficient commercial success to invest into research and such for what they hope will be later commercial benefit. 4) Universities get money from people who confiscated the money from other people, under threat of force and who might not have given it otherwise, and give it to a cause they believe in. Not necessarily in that order by whatever measure you may choose. Note that, In no case did the wealth magically just appear. The wealth to consume was produced somewhere by someone. Sounds like you're proposing 4 as you imply that the we that is not the companies won't be trying to create the wealth you want to use in your cause.
        • manigandham 10y ago
          Universities are still businesses. Grants, tuition, other fees, donations, endowments, etc all generate plenty of cash.
        • roel_v 10y ago
          There's plenty of fundamental research being done. Research doesn't yield products.
        • duncanawoods 10y ago
          Building roads/bridges is probably the better analogy. Infrastructure type public goods never seems to come from donations, only taxes.
    • ronreiter 10y ago
      Easier said than done.
  • ronreiter 10y ago
    Not sales. Marketing. In today's world having someone push a new database for a hefty price is not going to work. I would need to be able to test it against mongo and decide myself that it is better... but how would I know it's even an option?
    • erikpukinskis 10y ago
      Is there a firm line between sales and marketing these days? Is sales just the high-touch end of the marketing continuum?
      • erichocean 10y ago
        > Is sales just the high-touch end of the marketing continuum? IMO, no. Sales and marketing are pretty different things. Marketing isn't "sales without people", and sales isn't "marketing done in person". They target different problems, and you may need one, the other, or both to be convincing, depending on the product or service.
      • imtringued 10y ago
        Marketing is about figuring out your customer's needs. Sales is about promoting your products. Both are done to sell more stuff.
        • the_duke 10y ago
          Marketing is more about making the customers think they need your product.
        • barrkel 10y ago
          Marketing has always been a bit vague. Some definitions of marketing subsume the entire purpose of a company; for example, one definition is "identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably" - this could be used as the definition of a business enterprise. IMO marketing is all about getting a good fit between what the company sells and what the market outside the company wants. It could be creating demand, so that the market changes to fit what the company creates; or it could be shaping the company's offerings to what the market is asking for; or it could be advertising, to make the market more aware of how the company's current offerings are a good solution for what the market is asking for. One way or another, it's about bridging the gap. Sales is the process of completing profitable transactions. It's typically high-touch, one to one, and involves taking prospects, qualifying them, figuring out what they need and how the company's current offerings solve that problem in a personalized way, and managing the process to completion, and potentially further to upselling in the future. It's a pipelined process and is ultimately a numbers game, where the odds of proceeding to completion depend on both the value proposition and the salesperson's skill in communicating it.
• hatchoo 10y ago
  Well, Slava himself posted the (sad) news so it can't be any more true than that.
• chipotle_coyote 10y ago
  Everyone at RethinkDB was incredible to work with. Thanks for showing everyone how to write amazing documentation Thank you! (Really. I'm RethinkDB's documentation writer/editor.)
  • TheMissingPiece 10y ago
    <3
  • happertiger 10y ago
    I have always wondered why there isn't a tech company that just does kick ass documentation for companies. Seems like a small group of people who make kick butt stuff in this area. Really, you did have fantastic documentation, as the original said. Kudos.
    • chipotle_coyote 10y ago
      Thank you. And...hmm. That's an interesting question.
      • grantjgordon 10y ago
        The Rethink docs truly are incredible. Do you have any guides or books you recommend for writing good documentation? What software did you use to produce Rethink? Sorry to see Rethink go.
        • chipotle_coyote 10y ago
          The documentation is all maintained in Markdown and built with Jekyll, so it's pretty straightforward. There were a few custom Jekyll tags. For writing, I used the venerable Mac editor BBEdit; obviously any text editor can do a fine job here, but there are some subtleties in BBEdit I liked. Its "open file by name" command can open multiple files with the same name at once, for instance, and its find/replace functionality goes above and beyond the call of duty. For books/guides, it's hard to say. Find documentation you like a lot and think about what makes it good--the organization/taxonomy is really important to pay attention to, as well as the tone (formal, conversational, weird, etc.). As shocking as this might be around here, the _Microsoft Manual of Style_ is useful as a specifically technical guide, and it's good to have a relative recent edition of the _Chicago Manual of Style_ kicking around as a reference. And, just being familiar with standard grammar and punctuation rules is important. A lot of people aren't. (A lot of people who aren't still think they are.)