3 ms·

That sounds pretty cool, though I'd have to think about how such a thing would function with the workflow of my team. I think it could be done though! It soun

That sounds pretty cool, though I'd have to think about how such a thing would function with the workflow of my team. I think it could be done though! It sounds like a more reliable way to do shared work on office docs. I see some issues with it. No matter how smooth you make this, any software with pull requests is going to be considered "technical". Christ, people think basic excel skills are "technical". SO you have to get over that hurdle. But personally, if I've already gotten people over that hurdle, I might as well just use git and LaTeX documents. I don't know, I think it sounds awesome, but I also think it might be tough to sell.

peteforde 7y ago
We tried to attack the market with a Github model: share your open source data and docs publicly (our true passion) and pay to have private repos. Our mistake, as I said elsewhere, is that there was no market. We had many sales conversations and zero takers. For context, we were fully under the spell of The Great Big Data Hype of 2011 (see the current AI hype for reference) and convinced ourselves that there would be so many opportunities that we'd have our pick of which path to take. In fairness to our past selves, for a while this seemed true; valuations were insane for companies with vague value props in the space. And we met with dozens of influencers in the data world and they all professed to be excited to use it. Most of them ultimately logged in once, realized they had no hair-on-fire problem for us to solve, and stopped returning our emails. It was frustrating in the extreme. I just found one of our product videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4
peteforde 7y ago
Also, we actually did make everything available via git alongside the web frontend, API access, downloadable formats and even a beta Google Docs live connection integration. We had it set up so that you could hit save in Excel and it would commit a new version for everyone following it to access. git wasn't yet supporting large binary commits very well (not that it's amazing support today) but I remember us going very deep on this python library that fudged support for large binary repos with the glorified equivalent of symlinks. I'm not sure we ever really got this working well and my memory is honestly fuzzy enough that it's getting harder to sort what we did from what I desperately wanted to do before we ran out of cash and I got depressed enough to take two years off and run away to Europe with a crazy person. Humans are funny.

peteforde 7y ago

We tried to attack the market with a Github model: share your open source data and docs publicly (our true passion) and pay to have private repos. Our mistake, as I said elsewhere, is that there was no market. We had many sales conversations and zero takers. For context, we were fully under the spell of The Great Big Data Hype of 2011 (see the current AI hype for reference) and convinced ourselves that there would be so many opportunities that we'd have our pick of which path to take. In fairness to our past selves, for a while this seemed true; valuations were insane for companies with vague value props in the space. And we met with dozens of influencers in the data world and they all professed to be excited to use it. Most of them ultimately logged in once, realized they had no hair-on-fire problem for us to solve, and stopped returning our emails. It was frustrating in the extreme. I just found one of our product videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4

peteforde 7y ago

Also, we actually did make everything available via git alongside the web frontend, API access, downloadable formats and even a beta Google Docs live connection integration. We had it set up so that you could hit save in Excel and it would commit a new version for everyone following it to access. git wasn't yet supporting large binary commits very well (not that it's amazing support today) but I remember us going very deep on this python library that fudged support for large binary repos with the glorified equivalent of symlinks. I'm not sure we ever really got this working well and my memory is honestly fuzzy enough that it's getting harder to sort what we did from what I desperately wanted to do before we ran out of cash and I got depressed enough to take two years off and run away to Europe with a crazy person. Humans are funny.