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Diaspora suffers from the Marimba effect. You can't combine insane media hype with the "release early, release often" strategy. Worse, they convinced consumers

Diaspora suffers from the Marimba effect. You can't combine insane media hype with the "release early, release often" strategy. Worse, they convinced consumers (rather than professional investors) to invest in a product before it existed. Meeting the expectations generated by that are hard to meet, especially for a relatively novice team. (as far as I can tell) They might pull it off in the long term, but I would never have dreamed of going about it the way they did.

hkuo 16y ago
I'm curious how you would have gone about it. Would you have tried a more underground path, generating movement slowly with more emotionally invested users? Or withheld the product months or even a year after it was promised to make sure it was beyond peoples expectations?
- wccrawford 16y ago
  How about not promising it so early in the first place? Giving a real timeline instead of something crazy? Or maybe being realistic about what you're promising? They didn't give a featureset, they just promised a first version. That means something different to everyone.
  - ambirex 16y ago
    Managing customer/user expectations is just as important in the open source world as it is in private business.
    - pmjordan 16y ago
      There is no distinction once you start taking money, really. Or once you have a critical mass of mainstream users (I'm thinking of Firefox, etc.).
- pmjordan 16y ago
  I claim no authority on this, but: when the money suddenly started pouring in, they really needed to take a step back and figure out what these people who were throwing money at them actually wanted. Then, build a bare-bones but polished minimum viable product that is actually useful and usable for the majority of users. Don't make any specific, bold announcements, but rather "it'll be done when it's done". The "developer preview" would have been fine for slow, bottom-up growth, but it isn't in this reality. The product was already consumer facing before it even existed, so the audience is wrong.
gaius 16y ago
Wow, there's a name I've not heard in a long time, Marimba and Castanet were once the poster children of the Java revolution. When all monolithic apps would be broken down into install-on-demand components... Wonder what happened to that Kim Polese.
- petercooper 16y ago
  Until recently she was CEO of Spikesource: http://www.spikesource.com/ http://www.spikesource.com/ .. but is now just on the board. Her bio suggests she's not lacking for things to attend to: Kim serves on the executive council of TechNet, a bipartisan coalition of executives focused on the growth of the technology industry and economy, on the board of the Global Security Institute and on the University of California President's Board on Science and Innovation. She is a Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's Center for Engineered Innovation. I have a bit of a weird hobby for checking out where previous "bright lights" of the Internet world ended up. It's surprising how many of them deliberately try to stay out of the limelight and hold NED board positions or work at quietly profitable enterprise-focused startups that don't get much press.
  - gaius 16y ago
    Indeed, at one time it looked like she was going to be a household name.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

hkuo 16y ago

I'm curious how you would have gone about it. Would you have tried a more underground path, generating movement slowly with more emotionally invested users? Or withheld the product months or even a year after it was promised to make sure it was beyond peoples expectations?

wccrawford 16y ago
How about not promising it so early in the first place? Giving a real timeline instead of something crazy? Or maybe being realistic about what you're promising? They didn't give a featureset, they just promised a first version. That means something different to everyone.
- ambirex 16y ago
  Managing customer/user expectations is just as important in the open source world as it is in private business.
  - pmjordan 16y ago
    There is no distinction once you start taking money, really. Or once you have a critical mass of mainstream users (I'm thinking of Firefox, etc.).
pmjordan 16y ago
I claim no authority on this, but: when the money suddenly started pouring in, they really needed to take a step back and figure out what these people who were throwing money at them actually wanted. Then, build a bare-bones but polished minimum viable product that is actually useful and usable for the majority of users. Don't make any specific, bold announcements, but rather "it'll be done when it's done". The "developer preview" would have been fine for slow, bottom-up growth, but it isn't in this reality. The product was already consumer facing before it even existed, so the audience is wrong.

gaius 16y ago

Wow, there's a name I've not heard in a long time, Marimba and Castanet were once the poster children of the Java revolution. When all monolithic apps would be broken down into install-on-demand components... Wonder what happened to that Kim Polese.

petercooper 16y ago
Until recently she was CEO of Spikesource: http://www.spikesource.com/ http://www.spikesource.com/ .. but is now just on the board. Her bio suggests she's not lacking for things to attend to: Kim serves on the executive council of TechNet, a bipartisan coalition of executives focused on the growth of the technology industry and economy, on the board of the Global Security Institute and on the University of California President's Board on Science and Innovation. She is a Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's Center for Engineered Innovation. I have a bit of a weird hobby for checking out where previous "bright lights" of the Internet world ended up. It's surprising how many of them deliberately try to stay out of the limelight and hold NED board positions or work at quietly profitable enterprise-focused startups that don't get much press.
- gaius 16y ago
  Indeed, at one time it looked like she was going to be a household name.
deleted 16y ago
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