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I feel the article vastly underestimates the difficulties associated with scaling to Instagram's size at buyout and the time it takes for developers to come to
by nickbarnwell 14y ago
I feel the article vastly underestimates the difficulties associated with scaling to Instagram's size at buyout and the time it takes for developers to come to terms with and accommodate that. The first 80% of Instagram is the app and sharing, the next 20% of building the network out is where all the value was created and the majority of development time was invested.
The founders described it as "replacing all the components of a car while driving it at 100mph", and even having worked on projects orders of magnitude smaller (albeit with a considerably more complex datamodel) I can't say I disagree.
- johnla 14y agoTrue. I watched an interview of one of the founders and he revealed that Instagram is just a offshoot feature of their original product. So the cost of mistakes are not taken into account. It's like someone proving out that E=MC^2 AFTER Einstein already figured out the problem. It's still a cool exercise to do! I wish he would do that for more sites and apps! I bet the Draw Something app isn't that expensive to reproduce.
- andgarzon 14y agoAgree with both of you guys. And of course I am making a lot of assumptions, but wanted to help devs realize the value of different components of a business. Because if that wasn't the case, Facebook could have just build an app just like Instagram.