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Spolsky on Building Communities and More
- worldvoyageur 15y agoSelect highlights version: The era of software was a narrow period of time. Before 1980, customers purchased hardware and software was bundled for free with the hardware. Microsoft was brilliant because they realized they could sell software and make a hefty profit from it. Today, we’re in a post-software phase. The software isn’t the valuable asset, it’s the ability to tap into a community that is truly valuable. ...software is not difficult to build and hosting element has become a commodity; the hard part is building a community. That’s the unique element, the people who you can convince to come to your site each and every day. Lesson: Whatever you choose to do in your career, think about how you’re going to capture a community. Stop blogging to your friends. Start blogging to your customers and your intended audience. StackOverflow wouldn’t have worked unless I had spent 10 years building a community of programmers. ...skeptical about building on the iOS platform long term, feels that it’s not a great platform for vendors because they have no control over whether Apple allows your application in their marketplace. Pageviews are so cheap to deliver that if you can monetize a small fraction of them you can run a very nice business.