DAMN. WE HAVE DONE IT. REALLY. OVERSING IS AMAZING. We have made the Facebook for Business that is the holy grail of the new generation of software. I have been struggling with one feature, and Kirill persuaded me to dump an old idea, and stay in our workspace metaphor. Taking his advice, I have designed the last piece this morning and its elegant. Sure, it will be a v1 product. But you cant use Oversing and not see where it will evolve. We cannot deliver the full v3 scope in v1. Even though I probably could afford to do it, I think the opportunity cost is too high. Sure, there are features wed like to include now instead of later - I simply cannot produce some features at our current scale. For example, I am pretty sure... not positive, that we can eliminate the email problem in business entirely in a few years. That means all email is encrypted, and only authorized email can get into a company. And that all email is automatically in the appropriate business context. Sure, Oversing is non-trivial. Its complicated. Its just one workspace but it has a bit of a learning curve (at least for the Project management and operations teams). Although I suspect its a lot easier to learn than other tools because the workspace is very intuitive. The social and collaboration features work similarly to FB, but, of course, we have project management of various kinds, and all sorts of reports, accounting integration and workflow management and that kind of thing. But the resistance to adoption in social media is less in business where certain tools are harder to learn but are necessary for the business. People will pay a learning curve in business - especially one like Oversings - if the benefit is there. And its there. Furthermore, I can do all of this at a price that will destroy the income streams of larger companies (you know who) if they try to match it. New technology has simply reduced the cost of software development to the point where software architecture of the 1980s and 1990s, not to mention the 2000s, is no longer economically viable. We simply can produce outrageous features at costs that previous technologies cannot match even with extraordinary talent. We still have various leak problems to solve, and we are asking a great deal of browsers (and they seem to be delivering). But we put no more of a memory burden on them than does Gmail. The performance problems I see are all related to the renderers and garbage collection, and we think thats all solvable. Or rather, it is solvable many ways. But in the final assessment, we have fulfilled our ambitions and more so. Health, Doubts, Revolution, and War to the contrary. Now, Im not going to share much of it, especially anything terribly novel, but this is enough of a taste of the workspace. ( And as much as I am against IP, you dont think in a world governed by IP Im not going to patent every possible thing I can, do you? :) )
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 08:06:47 +0000