
RethinkDB Failure: Product, Not Marketing - tepidandroid
http://movingfulcrum.com/rethinkdb-failure-engineering-not-marketing/
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timanglade
I know the founders of RethinkDB and have had drinks/meals with them in the
past. They're smart people that mean well and I absolutely believe they did
everything they thought possible to make it a viable business, so the last
paragraph comes across as a bit snippy to me.

I do think the author means well though, and is trying to construct a
rationale. As a product guy who worked for several database startups, the
delay on delivering a Java driver does seem a bit puzzling but some/most of
the other points can easily be explained by those two startups devils,
prioritization and product design. Does a MongoDB user look for automatic
failover before converting to Rethink? Probably! Would an advanced user,
perhaps leery of the pitfalls of automatic failovers prefer a more manual
approach? Likely! Should Rethink have focused on the former or the latter
group of users? Who's to say? I feel similarly conflicted about points #2–5.

The article does make a good point overarching though. In times of failure
it's easy for engineers to blame external factors like market or marketing
rather than look inward, and it could be that the product or engineering was
wrong. Failures at that stage are essentially Product-Market fit failures, and
they usually involve a bit of both Product and Market(ing). I'm just not sure
the points listed bear that out but would love to hear more, possibly from the
author or Slava & Mike @ Rethink?

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ta834939874
I like the analysis, definitely some points I didn't consider.

The Java points are certainly fair enough, although I'm unsure how much of the
target market actually uses Java. Java as the author states, is number 1 in
enterprise, a space where moving to a new database can take a great deal of
research and A/B testing.

I feel if the Java community was interested in RethinkDB, a few community
tools would have popped up to do the tasks the author discusses.

I certainly disagree with the author regarding point 5. Change feeds were one
of the substantial competitive advantages it had over other databases.
Rethinkdb was trying to innovate, and produce a unique and beneficial product
rather than build another NoSQL product.

Interesting that the reference that the author used was their own company - I
find it difficult to believe Pojo and Java 8 library stopped it taking the
Java world by storm. I see a few java clients back in 2013 - that appear to
have very little interest from the Java community.

