4 ms·
If failure is defined by not getting articles written about you in Quora / TC then certainly. Re dating sites: Try OkCupid / POF. Or the up and comer LikaALot.
by fleitz 16y ago
If failure is defined by not getting articles written about you in Quora / TC then certainly.
Re dating sites: Try OkCupid / POF. Or the up and comer LikaALot.
"Social recommendations", seriously are you insane? Do you have any idea how much business is driven via social recommendations? If social recommendations didn't work then amazon would have no 'people who bought, also bought...' If you had a company that could make those things 10% better you'd have a truckload of money.
Anything that makes programming "easy for non-programmers or businesspeople":
You might want to ask a little company called Microsoft about that and how much money they make by making it easy to program. Perhaps you've heard of something called ruby / python, that offload massive amounts of intellectual capacity off of programmers. Seriously, how many ruby programmers know assembly? How many companies derive incredible amounts of money from things like profilers, etc. Barely, anyone programs computers anymore.
Anything involving paying people to look at ads:
You might want to ask the hundreds of companies that run things called 'focus groups' about that.
Anything that promises to make email a thing of the past:
You've probably got an IM client on your desktop, might want to ask 37 signals about a product called Campfire. There's also that company called Twitter.
- drdaeman 16y agoAs for programming for non-programmers, Ruby is still a programming language for programmers. Just higher-level one. But there are tools like LabVIEW and Simulink (MATLAB plugin), which are fairly popular among engineers.
- agazso 16y agoOk, I tell you one everyone knows: Excel.
- drdaeman 16y agoIndeed.
- jerf 16y agoOK, so you've got an example that is all but a straight line from Visicalc. If that's still the dominant example after all these decades, it does not sound like a market that has been successfully disrupted, right? And indeed many have tried and all have failed. It is exactly what the article says, a perennial startup loser (and open source project loser too).
- gruseom 16y agoYes, spreadsheets are the obvious case of "programming for non-programmers" having succeeded. Are there others? Hypercard? Lotus Notes?
- lacker 16y agoHTML?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- petercooper 16y agoPerhaps you've heard of something called ruby / python, that offload massive amounts of intellectual capacity off of programmers. I'm not sure where this falls on the serious-but-mental/clever-troll scale but it's pretty far at one end or the other. Ruby and Python offload massive amounts of intellectual capacity from programmers? They're not "non-programmers" then, are they?
- uriel 16y agoNever heard of "LikaALot", and googling doesn't come up with anything, do you have a link?
- brandnewlow 16y agohttp://lal.com http://lal.com
- uriel 16y agoSeems to expect I'm in a university campus? _sigh_
- hasenj 16y agoPython and Ruby are for programmers. Non-programmers don't understand objects and functions, let alone higher-order functions.
- IDisposableHero 16y agoIf social recommendations didn't work then amazon would have no 'people who bought, also bought...' The point is, if your business starts off as "we sell books" (and expands to "we sell books and stuff") and you get a lot of users that way, you can mix in some social recommendations on the existing user base and thereby sell more books and stuff. If your business is "we do social recommendations" you're screwed.