
StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform - rayvega
http://www.stackexchange.com/
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tptacek
I'm surprised/impressed at how quickly they're moving on this whole Stack
Overflow concept. There are YC startups that don't seem to be as nimble as
Atwood's team. What's the long-term relationship between Atwood and Fog Creek?

~~~
LargeWu
SO is only, I think, 3 programmers including Atwood. So I should hope they're
nimble. Why they should be any less nimble than a YC startup would never even
occur to me.

Spolsky is really more of a silent partner in this (maybe not so silent
publicly, but the impression I get from their podcasts is that he is involved
only on the business end).

~~~
pchristensen
Many people in this community think Atwood is a retard because he writes about
stuff he's not an expert in, and because he uses Microsoft products. I venture
to guess that many people here think he's not of the caliber of programmer
that YC invests in. He has clearly proven them wrong.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
To be fair, a lot of the success comes from the size of the audience of him
and Joel.

~~~
slpsys
That's not being fair, that's being contrary. If StackOverflow was a stupid
idea or poorly executed, no one would use it. Yes, they announced it from a
pretty tall pulpit, but if no one cared what either of them had to say--for or
against--no one would care to read their blogs, either.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
Sure, it's being fair. Before we go off and pronounce that "Jeff Atwood has
proven everyone wrong," let's keep a few things in mind. Also, having a lot of
readership does not prove someone is a top shelf programmer.

To be honest, this is not even something that Joel and, perhaps, Jeff haven't
said themselves.

~~~
pchristensen
I think StackOverflow is sufficient to prove that Jeff isn't a retard or a
lousy programmer. That's what it proves, nothing more.

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stuntgoat
Anyone know of plans for non-profit or educational use? I imagine the folks
trying to cure diseases or solve environmental problems could use a tool like
this.

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orph
Here is a half-completed django implementation of StackOverflow called
soclone: <http://code.google.com/p/soclone/>. No changes since 2008 though.

~~~
patio11
I think this is going in my next essay about OSS vs. proprietary software.

Proprietary software: OK, so technically it both exists and works, but it
costs money.

OSS: It has only had one man-week of labor in it. The software is not feature
complete. However, if it actually worked, it would be _awesome_ because you'd
be able to browse your corporate knowledge base _on your Wii_. Also, it would
support browsers without Javascript, because your office is _cool_ and lets
workers change things like that.

Successful open source projects -- the ones you use, the ones you love, the
ones you have heard of -- are the exception. Projects like this are the rule.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
That's not a very interesting observation. Part of the reason that successful
open source projects are, presumably, statistically far less than unsuccessful
ones is that the barrier to entry in order to start an open source project is
basically non-existant.

Any 12 year old who gets an idea for a game can put up a project on
sourceforge. However, proprietary software has steeper barrier. Typically, it
comes from people in an established company if not an entrenched bureaucracy.
It's more interesting to choose projects that have achieved certain milestones
(beyond one man-week of labor as you put it).

As well, there are plenty of proprietary projects that have failed and you
have never heard of and never will. Data about failed proprietary projects is
much more difficult to find. However, open source projects are almost entirely
transparent about that kind of thing.

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robryan
Hope this works out for them, great way to moneterize the platform without
having the rely solely on a advertising supported business model.

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ktharavaad
Seems really pricey for a relatively simple software like this. Someone write
an opensource alternative? it looks like something that can be thrown together
in a weekend.

~~~
jasonkester
A weekend? Really?

We have documented evidence in the form of podcasts that it took a team of 3
talented developers about 6 months to build StackOverflow. If you're looking
for an order of magnitude estimate for how long it would take to reproduce it,
that's it.

How exactly are you planning to reduce an 18 man-month project down to a
single weekend of your time?

More generally, why is this attitude so common among programmers? How, in the
face of documented proof to the contrary could an intelligent person like the
parent still consider a site of the complexity of StackOverflow to be a
"weekend job"?

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davidw
I think it's certainly longer than a weekend, but recreating something that
exists is usually easier than doing it the first time. You don't really have
to worry so much about how things ought to fit together - you just copy.

~~~
raganwald
And I can't tell you how many doomed Death March projects started with this
assumption. "The requirements are done, the design is done, we know it can be
done, simply copy what we see there."

The boil it down to a cliché, copying what someone else has built is exactly
the same problem as rewriting an existing application from scratch, without
the benefit of being able to read the source code.

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>

~~~
davidw
Rewriting a cross platform browser in C++ is _way_ more difficult than writing
something that took a small team 6 months to do. I'm not trying to say that
it's a weekend, but have a look at SO. Unless there's something I'm missing,
it's not "deep hacking", but more "crank it out" (not to take anything away
from that team - they certainly did nice work!). Scaling might be an issue
sooner or later, and that would take some more thinking, but the basic thing
just doesn't strike me as some Big Hairy Problem.

So, yeah, be wary of "hey, that looks easy!", but don't think things are
impossible either.

~~~
raganwald
Rewriting a browser isn't impossible either, as Firefox proves. Perhaps SO is
an order of magnitude easier than a browser, but I stand by my suggestion that
copying an existing application you didn't actually write is often much more
difficult than expected and has led many teams to their doom.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
That's interesting. However, there are already several clones of SO and a
couple that reproduce the vast majority of the functionality.

~~~
wlievens
You can't even check that, because a significant part of SO's functionality
could be hidden from you.

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vaksel
is it me or is it a little bit pricey in the mid range? 1 million page views
is nothing, and then you are stuck in a $999 plan without actual traction to
monetize.

And there is no reason to be stuck on a $999 plan on a shared server, if for
$300 bucks more you can get unlimited + dedicated server.

Seems like the $999 plan should be $499 instead, and the $1299 plan should be
$999.

And come to think of it, the pricing seems pretty high. Let's face it, the
software is very simple and could be duplicated very quickly. Why pay $999/mo,
when you can have a few hackers code it up in a couple of weeks for a few
grand.

Hell, someone should do it here, would be a decent startup idea, copy them,
but charge $29.99/$59.99/$99.99 for your plans.

~~~
patio11
_Why pay $999/mo, when you can have a few hackers code it up in a couple of
weeks for a few grand._

The long road of our industry is littered with the corpses of projects which
would only take a few programmers a couple of weeks to program. But technical
risk isn't the big worry here for a startup.

 _Hell, someone should do it here, would be a decent startup idea, copy them,
but charge $29.99/$59.99/$99.99 for your plans._

That hypothetical startup would be:

a) Trying to market the product without having a successful reference
implementation available and without having Joel & Jeff to bootstrap the
reference implementation.

b) Be aimed squarely at the low end of the market. (i.e. penny-pinching
pathological customers rather than enterprises for whom $1,000 is
inconsequentially cheap if it brings projects in on time) This buys you some
very fun customer support duties.

c) Need to sell minimally several dozen companies on a quirky knowledge-base
type product per FTE they wanted to support.

d) Get to compete on search advertising with someone who can afford to
outspend them ten-to-one for customer acquisition.

~~~
vaksel
The first part, I wasn't talking about building it. I was talking about a
customer, who is stuck paying $999-2500 a month, for a product that can be
built by a few programmers in a few weeks.

That hypothetical startup wouldn't need to give customer service. You want
customer service and like paying large fees? Go to stackexchange, you want a
working solution at a huge discount? You come to the hypothetical startup.

Basically its the case of Stackexchange playing the role of a big pricey
inbred company, and you giving them the 34signals option

~~~
sanj
Conservatively:

3 programmers * 2 weeks * $100/h = $24k

Or, the ability to run this _right now_ for 10m to 2 years.

~~~
petercooper
To be fair, the average programmer is not earning $180-200k per year, not even
the average contractor.

~~~
JacobK
Correct. But the total cost of hiring a programmer is easily estimated as
3*salary. $200k/year is a fairly cheap full-time programmer with overhead.

Don't forget to include all the office space, gym membership, soda, insurance,
maternity leave, matching 401(k) contributions, hardware, software, internet
access, telephone service, tech support, sysadmins, office managers, etc.
necessary to support that one programmer.

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10ren
Their terms are so good (45 day free trial, immediate cancel & refund at any
time), that I wish I had a use for it that justified the price. Even as a
user-support for a software product, it would be cool. Probably cheaper, if
you have serious support costs - for example, that (possibly fake) Gates
article quoted $500 million per year in support costs. Saving a fraction of
that is worth the costs quoted. I'm sure it's similar for other big
corporations - and even for internal use.

As for price, you'd be amazed at what corporations will pay for solutions to
their problems. This is because you'd be amazed at how much their problems
cost them.

------
ankhmoop
Until I clicked on the link, I was excited, as the comments on monetization
lead me think they might be providing a marketplace for me to provide for-fee
answers to users.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

As it is, I don't bother to use StackOverflow. My questions would be too
esoteric for the audience/format, and nearly all of the questions I see are
boring, easily answerable with a search of the documentation. The questions
would be less boring if I were paid to answer them, and then I'd be more
likely to find a few gems to answer, too.

~~~
torpor
I find StackOverflow very boring as well .. but I don't need to use it much.
I've only visited the few times in interest because I always like to find nice
technological discussions, but .. so far .. its been pretty "meh".

There haven't been any mind-blowing awesome gems of answers in there that have
caught my eye - mostly pretty mundane things, content-wise, and as a
programmer looking for an interesting community, I don't really get that vibe
from it much at all.

To me it just seems like a place for kids to go and get their homework done
for them by lonely strung out alpha dogs looking to place some authority in
the world.

For me, sites like this will never replace the good ol' USENET groups and
subsidiary mailing lists. Once again (as is the case with Twitter), a web site
springs up to try to capture an audience from the pool of people who are just
not competent enough with E-mail to manage it properly and exploit the results
..

~~~
ilyak
USENET is for discussions; SO is for questions and answers. Those are
orthogonal.

~~~
torpor
>Those are orthogonal.

Nope.

~~~
jawngee
Jay?

~~~
torpor
Wut?

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hopeless
I've long thought that a StackOverflow for photographers would be a great
resource... but not a business. Unfortunately, the StackExchange pricing
assumes that you will be a revenue-generating because no one can justify
$129/month on running a free resource.

~~~
chaosmachine
Photographers are actually a really monetizable audience compared to most.
Sign up with the right affiliate program, and a single sale could cover that
$129.

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zach
This is great. I was hoping this would happen since so much microdocumentation
is only ever shared between team members on large projects and is not easily
available to new members.

On the other hand, I guess the idea they mooted early on of going open source
is dead now.

~~~
rayvega
It seems that they still intend to open source it sometime in the future:
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/35/will-
stackoverflo...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/35/will-
stackoverflows-engine-be-open-sourced)

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lut4rp
I'd say its possible to do this using Drupal in 2 weeks.

Oh, wait, did you say "3" talented developers?

Please, less than a week then. Drupal already has ready-made modules for this
type of functionality. All you need is to throw 'em together. The price is too
high, sorry.

~~~
decadentcactus
Oh ok. Come back in a week with your site that parallels SO in features and
activity then.

And "I'm too busy working on other projects" doesn't count as an excuse.

~~~
lut4rp
Yes, it does count here. I'm working with Google Summer of Code 2009 right
now. And incidentally, my project is related to voting :-)

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gojomo
I think this is a great idea. My questions as a potential user would be:

(1) How much visual customization will be supported?

(2) I won't have to make people use OpenID, will I?

(3) Does the Fog Creek/Atwood team plan more verticals that I might
inadvertently find myself competing against?

~~~
billpg
#include "i love openid and so should you. here's some arguments that probably
didn't convince you last time you heard them.txt"

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pibefision
The software is excelent, but the pricing fails.

Supose that i'e an idea to build a community using StackExchange. How can I
monetize it to pay U$S999 a month once I pass 1mm pageviews? It's quite hard!

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bayareaguy
Anyone want to guess how long it will take for Microsoft SharePoint to copy
this interface?

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blasdel
The segmentation between 'shared' and 'dedicated' hosting is bizarre -- aren't
you paying them not to have to care about that?

Furthermore, it leads me to think poorly of their software -- did they really
manage to fuck up something as embarrassingly parallel as responding to HTTP
Requests? Maybe it's just that their MS toolchain is ignorant of the
possibility...

~~~
DrJokepu
There's nothing bizarre with it in my opinion - it's easy to understand, even
for non-technical people, who are likely to make the decision at Big
Enterprise whether to buy Plan A or Plan B. I don't see how a marketing
decision such as this could give any insight into the efficiency and quality
of their implementation of HTTP request handling.

