
'Theocracy of Hackers' Rules Autodesk Inc., A Strangely Run Firm - prakash
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123187573419078157.html
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rbanffy
Maybe a "Theocracy of Hackers" is what you call a meritocracy you can't really
understand.

Not to say Walker is not... quirky.

But a tech company loses a lot when it's not driven by hackers.

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prakash
It also loses a lot when the founders & the _core_ move on to other things.

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igorhvr
This article is an absolute piece of crap.

You can read John Walker's own rebuttal here:
<http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/section2_99_4.html>

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prakash
good find. thanks!

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krschultz
"Most profitable company among the 2,000 surveyed".

CAD/CAE is so ripe for open source competition it is not even funny.

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dominik
"This article was published on May 28, 1992."

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iamelgringo
I know that article was over 15 years old, but there I'm sure there's still
remnants of the Hackocracy. The scripting language for AutoCAD program remains
a dialect of Lisp: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP>

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zandorg
There's a certain irony when you consider that Xanadu (funded by Autodesk)
could have been the entire Web, now she's picking up scraps of that in Yahoo.

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bayareaguy
Ted Nelson's Xanadu is amazing in that its ideas predate the internet
(timesharing systems where the "new thing" then). Unfortunately Nelson made it
far too complicated and constraining for anyone to ever put to practical
use[1]. In some ways I think Autodesk's funding may have hurt more than it
helped because it allowed him to continue working in an environment free from
the feedback of an actual user community.

Tim Berners-Lee's genius is that he took the good ideas of Xanadu and other
systems that made sense in the context of the internet, released something
early that his users could actually use and more often then not focused on
addressing their actual concerns instead of his own imagined ones.

[1] - Xanadu Original 17 rules:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rule...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rules)

