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> "I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale." Zooomr did. They came out of nowhere in 2006 and were a real threat to Flickr. They
by xiaoma 10y ago
> "I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale."
Zooomr did. They came out of nowhere in 2006 and were a real threat to Flickr. They had AJAX-powered editss, geotagging, various other unique features and they were starting to pull in some highly followed followed photographers.
But, the site kept crashing as traffic grew and some scaling problems even lead to data loss. I wanted to see them win but they just couldn't keep up with traffic and eventually Yahoo cloned their features and they became irrelevant.
https://techcrunch.com/tag/zooomr/ https://techcrunch.com/tag/zooomr/
- timewarrior 10y agoMain question here is that would they have done better if they had started with scale in mind. When you start you don't know how you product will look like when it has millions of users. You will likely do major product changes quite a few times. If someone cannot scale your product which has adoption, they likely don't have insights, problem definition, capabilities, skills and resources to do that when they launch. If I could edit my original post, I would put a rider related to capable team for service not dying.