
If you sit by the river long enough, you'll see the body of your enemy float by. - glower
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/03/28/justSittinByTheRiver.html
======
blasdel
It's _"something [Dave Winer] gave up on long ago"_ because he has one of the
lowest reputations of anyone in our field.

Here's a pretty good introduction:
[http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...](http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer_number)
(read the comments)

He has a long history of fucking over business partners and customers,
developing mediocre ball-of-mud software, writing terrible specifications and
being the worst spec-maintainer of all time. Thankfully most of his technical
efforts have been unsuccessful, despite the effect his self-aggrandizement had
on the media for much of the last decade.

Unfortunately a few of his clusterfucks did slip out: XML-RPC, SOAP, and his
epic mismanagement of RSS (which only ended with a headshot from Atom). The
man singlehandedly set the web's progress back about a decade! If not for him,
the nightmare of WS-* would not have existed -- the likes of Microsoft and IBM
would have done something stupid in a big way, but they wouldn't have
pretended it had anything to do with the web.

~~~
jrockway
But he invented blogging!!!11!!

... several years after everyone else did.

------
wallflower
"In 2002 we had a bunch of people we fired and they were saying really untrue
stuff about us in [Utah's] valley. It's a small valley.

We were just a $4M business - who cares about a $4M business - investors
don't. We were saying 'you know we would never do it - you guys know us but
you know it was he says, she says. But you know what, the day of reckoning
must come. You just build the business. The credibility comes with the quality
of business. Then they realize that the stuff you were saying was
true...Revenue forgives all sins"

Josh James, founder of Omniture, sold to Adobe for $1.8B

[http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james-
december...](http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james-
december-8-2009.html)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164815>

------
antipaganda
Yes. Sometimes, your enemy is on a boat, with many women and beers.

------
mononcqc
The title is only true if you sit downstream :(

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TheSOB88
What does this mean? This sentence especially is quite confusing:

"It works! As your competitors rise, eventually they have done to them what
they did to you, and if you sit there a while, you don't have to do a thing --
nature takes care of it. "

whaaa???

~~~
jrockway
Eventually people that make fun of you die.

Of course, so do you.

~~~
electromagnetic
Basically hope you're young when you get screwed over, if you're old the
chances are you'll die before you get the karmic justice you desperately want
. . . at least that's what the authors point seems to be.

~~~
kentosi
Judging by this thread so far, it seems as if everyone's almost just as
confused as I am by this article... :-(

What does the "river" represent? The flow of activity/competition/life? Why
would you sit still and watch it all pass by you?

If A = the point where you and your competitor started in this "river"
journey, B = the point at which you got out of the river and sat by it, and C
= some distant point where your competitor is still "moving" with the river,
then you have a situation where A < B < C.

How an earth can your enemy pass you by? Unless there's a tide that makes the
river flow in again at some point?

My logical brain can't handle this ...

~~~
jrockway
You are way overthinking it. The image you are supposed to see is your
competitor's corpse floating down the river. That's it.

~~~
blasdel
I wouldn't be so sure — after all, Winer 'invented' the "river of news" UI

Instead of having an inbox of his enemies' obituaries with an unread count, he
sees a continuous stream of corpses float by.

