

Why we failed – Good product, not enough waves - esher
http://blog.fortrabbit.com/goodbye-webrechnung/

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ChuckMcM
These two paragraphs hold a secret :

 _"Our main problem with WebRechnung is that it doesn’t fit our standards any
more – software, as everything, degrades over time. The interwebs is moving
fastly forward, everything is evolving. Adapt or die. We don’t want to see
this old piece of software (base core is 3 years old now) out there into the
wild much longer.

We would love to publish it on GitHub. Unfortunately this software is not
really a modern ninja style stand alone application. It is tightly integrated
into our monolithic MISH system – mostly written in Perl and impossible to
understand for an outsider anyways. And it’s really old: dependencies are
outdated, large parts of the code are in need of major re-factoring. We would
rather rewrite everything before touching this code again."_

One of the challenges of building software on open source frameworks is
building _durable_ software. I have been playing with thttpd recently on the
Rpi and amazed at how durable this software is. It hasn't been changed a whole
lot in years and years, and it just works. And it does that because everything
it depends on is also not changing and just works.

The challenge for this new generation of programmers is to create a durable
environment where folks could write invoicing software once and have it just
work.

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onion2k
This highlights something that many start ups fail to properly understand - a
good product is a tiny part of the challenge of succeeding with a business.
Without some way of getting the word out there people won't find your product.
It doesn't matter how good it is. And if people don't find you, you're dead.

Every start up needs a good understanding of tech to build something saleable,
and a good understanding of marketing to bring people to the product. You
can't survive without both (caveat: you can buy marketing).

~~~
petercooper
You can buy tech too ;-)

Indeed, I'd _suspect_ there are more relatively non technical companies who've
focused on the sales and market fit and made a killing on _relatively_ sub-par
outsourced tech than vice versa. Could be wrong though!

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lmm
Just because code is old and crappy is no reason not to open-source it. Many
successful projects (e.g. firefox) started that way.

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pragmatic
Please explain what MISH is/stands for.

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unreal37
If it's running fine as a free product, why does it have to be end-of-lifed?
Does it cost you anything?

~~~
insteadof
Sunsetting can also mean no longer having to support it via bugfixes and the
such. Time costs plenty when you could spend it building and working on other
things.

