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Exactly. This seems like a nice little PR move to have everyone talking about Scribd while this Flash-HTML5/Adobe-Apple thing is red hot. Now, people who had n

by yumraj 17y ago

Exactly. This seems like a nice little PR move to have everyone talking about Scribd while this Flash-HTML5/Adobe-Apple thing is red hot. Now, people who had never heard of this company are aware of them and am 100% sure their hit rate when way up high today.

purp 17y ago
Yep. It was clever of us to invest months of engineering time on this while also arranging for the Apple/Adobe schism to continue to worsen, and talk Steve Jobs into posting his thoughts at just the right time to frame our launch. We're just that amazing. ;]
- ggrot 17y ago
  What you did was a more than a PR stunt. The "betting the company" line is just dramatic hyperbole. I consider "betting the company" to be saying - OK, if X happens I'll shut down the company, if !X happens you'll buy my company for 100M dollars. In reality what you are saying is that if X happens, you waste alot of time, if !X happens then there is still no guaranteed outcome.
  - purp 17y ago
    I believe I understand your perspective. I think you're saying that "Betting The Company" == "Taking Mortal Risk", and I agree with that definition. I don't agree that the odds are fixed, nor that it's all-or-nothing-to-the-end. For any startup, you take mortal risk as infrequently as you can; you hedge those bets as much as you can; and, since you can invest effort to change the game in reaction to the market, you work to improve your odds over time. So in the end, I believe you present a false dichotomy. It's rarely $100MM or death, and there's never a guaranteed outcome.
  - earl 17y ago
    Seriously? You're whining about the CTO calling investing 6 months of three quarters of their dev team into a risky project betting the company? While it isn't literally a 100 percent make-or-break project, Scribd does have competitors who haven't been kind enough to sit on ass for 6 months. They need to have something with some business benefit to show for that 6 months or it's going to be extraordinarily painful.
- campnic 17y ago
  My concern would be this: 1) Flash is prevalent today. No matter how much people are bashing it on HN, its widely used especially on the sites which are incredibly popular. 2) HTML5 adoption will be slow. Look at how long it to ie6 to die and you'll have an idea of how long it will take html5 to become prevalent. 3) You're taking a technology that allows you to be accessible today and trading it for a technology which will allow you to be accessible at some unknown time in the future, basically removing any barrier to entry for your competitors. The hyperbole makes this seem worse then it is, I'm sure. You don't really have motivation to ditch your current flash implementation. You'll just put it into a "support as needed" mode.
  - pytxab 17y ago
    As the article points out, they are only using parts of HTML5 that are supported by older browsers, including IE6.
    - jarek 17y ago
      HTML5 must be some kind of wundertechnology. Reached draft in 2008, supported on browsers released in 2001. Come on, it's great that they're ditching Flash, but if it really works on IE6 calling it "HTML5" is nothing but link/pageview-bait. The parts of HTML5 that are supported by IE6 are called HTML4 and Javascript.
      - pytxab 17y ago
        Actually, browsers often implement features that aren't in a standard, just because they think it's a good idea. Some of those end up being memorialized by the W3C and part of HTML. Many of the features of HTML5 started that way, including, in this case, web fonts (part of CSS3).

by yumraj 17y ago

purp 17y ago

Yep. It was clever of us to invest months of engineering time on this while also arranging for the Apple/Adobe schism to continue to worsen, and talk Steve Jobs into posting his thoughts at just the right time to frame our launch. We're just that amazing. ;]

ggrot 17y ago
What you did was a more than a PR stunt. The "betting the company" line is just dramatic hyperbole. I consider "betting the company" to be saying - OK, if X happens I'll shut down the company, if !X happens you'll buy my company for 100M dollars. In reality what you are saying is that if X happens, you waste alot of time, if !X happens then there is still no guaranteed outcome.
- purp 17y ago
  I believe I understand your perspective. I think you're saying that "Betting The Company" == "Taking Mortal Risk", and I agree with that definition. I don't agree that the odds are fixed, nor that it's all-or-nothing-to-the-end. For any startup, you take mortal risk as infrequently as you can; you hedge those bets as much as you can; and, since you can invest effort to change the game in reaction to the market, you work to improve your odds over time. So in the end, I believe you present a false dichotomy. It's rarely $100MM or death, and there's never a guaranteed outcome.
- earl 17y ago
  Seriously? You're whining about the CTO calling investing 6 months of three quarters of their dev team into a risky project betting the company? While it isn't literally a 100 percent make-or-break project, Scribd does have competitors who haven't been kind enough to sit on ass for 6 months. They need to have something with some business benefit to show for that 6 months or it's going to be extraordinarily painful.
campnic 17y ago
My concern would be this: 1) Flash is prevalent today. No matter how much people are bashing it on HN, its widely used especially on the sites which are incredibly popular. 2) HTML5 adoption will be slow. Look at how long it to ie6 to die and you'll have an idea of how long it will take html5 to become prevalent. 3) You're taking a technology that allows you to be accessible today and trading it for a technology which will allow you to be accessible at some unknown time in the future, basically removing any barrier to entry for your competitors. The hyperbole makes this seem worse then it is, I'm sure. You don't really have motivation to ditch your current flash implementation. You'll just put it into a "support as needed" mode.
- pytxab 17y ago
  As the article points out, they are only using parts of HTML5 that are supported by older browsers, including IE6.
  - jarek 17y ago
    HTML5 must be some kind of wundertechnology. Reached draft in 2008, supported on browsers released in 2001. Come on, it's great that they're ditching Flash, but if it really works on IE6 calling it "HTML5" is nothing but link/pageview-bait. The parts of HTML5 that are supported by IE6 are called HTML4 and Javascript.
    - pytxab 17y ago
      Actually, browsers often implement features that aren't in a standard, just because they think it's a good idea. Some of those end up being memorialized by the W3C and part of HTML. Many of the features of HTML5 started that way, including, in this case, web fonts (part of CSS3).