

One ending for a startup: running unsupervised until something breaks - mcherm
http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201201/goodbye_tabblo.html

======
Timothee
At first, it will run by itself.

Then something will break and nobody will bring it back up. So for months, it
will just show an Apache error page. You'll see people complaining about it on
Twitter. (maybe you'll even hear Timothy Sykes bitch about it on Mixergy…)

Then you'll check one day and the domain will strangely redirect to a baseball
site.

And of course, further down the road, it will just be a parked domain.

And there's nothing you can do about it…

------
brlewis
Ned is right. There are no similar alternatives. For those of you who think
creating a photo sharing site means cloning something else out there, take a
look at Tabblo. There are many dimensions to photo sharing worth exploring.

~~~
patio11
PG wrote something similar once (<http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>) and it
strikes me as accurate. The social context of sharing kind of overwhelms the
technical difficulty of implementing it, so it becomes less a "where are we
going to put the bits" problem and more of a "who is sharing what with whom
and how" people problem. It's never been a huge thing to me, but as I grow
older I've come to learn that a lot of people close to me really, seriously
care about the life stories of their families as documented by photos, and
they're (still) not really well-served by the existing techy-friendly options.
(And that is a subtly different use case than _other_ photo sharing needs
_those same people_ have, to say nothing of what other people have.)

~~~
brlewis
Those non-techy people close to you who seriously care -- what are they doing
with their photos now?

~~~
patio11
Attaching refined petroleum products to dead plant matter using denatured
animal proteins remains popular.

~~~
brlewis
Are they shooting digital? How do they choose pics to print? What's the
process from camera to final product?

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kenrik
It must feel terrible to see something you built and put your
blood/sweat/tears into left to die after it's been purchased. I guess it
depends on if you were in it for the paycheck from the get go or to create
something that would live on. :-/

HP in general has a history of killing stuff off after purchase (Ehem..
Touchpad/WebOS I'm looking at you)

~~~
Domenic_S
I've discovered that you have to look at your life as moments in time,
especially as a software engineer. You will build something awesome, and you
will be proud of it, and all will be right with the world. And then, the
company you built it for will discontinue the project or die altogether and
you're left with nothing.

The key to staying sane is remembering those moments when your accomplishment
was there in front of all those people and you were excited and showing it off
to your friends and family.

Chances are that almost everything you ever made will be obsolete in a few
years, and probably long forgotten in 20 -- unlike, say, a civil engineer
who's roads will be around for the foreseeable future.

~~~
jf271
I've been in this business over 30 years and have seen many applications I've
created sunsetted. It is all a part of the cycle. Instead of worrying about it
I make new applications for new companies.

