"So How Long Would it Take for (Public Company X) to Replicate What You Have Built ?"
Aint this the truth; Ask the Wizard - "I cannot tell you how many times since we first launched FeedBurner I have heard the following comments from senior executives at large companies, industry pundits, hobbyists, and my five year old son: "We could build FeedBurner in [a weekend, three months with three people, whenever we wanted]". When you have hidden barriers to entry, you don't get too worked up about these kinds of comments because you know there are lots of pitfalls and issues and challenges that you don't understand fully until you are far enough along in development that you stumble into them and think "oh wow, now what do we do".
I'm regularly asked similar questions, as do most entrepreneurs in these types of businesses. Having spent enough time in large online co's to know how new product development and tech platforms work, the real question is how long it takes LargeCo to go from A What They Have (ie nothing in designated space x) to B (what they perceive u have.) In LargeCo it's always hard to go from good .ppt idea to working live approved project. To get through the board, management, functional heads, politics, tech team and so on.
My experience of new product development in the majors (at least locally, which is underweight in engineers and new products) it takes 12 months usually more, with more time in planning and approval than in tech development hours. The best ideas also never make it. You also can't go back in time. So playing catchup is alot harder than starting out in front, but then you can be too early and prove that the opportunity is not big enough.
A standalone product also does not need to take into account legacy systems, billing, CRM, and a whole raft of issues startups don't even look at. (this is also often why acquisitions get run as standalone businesses for so long and integration often doesn't happen or when it does, it pretty much means everything was rebuilt)
In different acquisition cases, the technology is what is of interest, in others the audience, and then there is the management team. Often it's all three. (flickr would be a good example of this) The Pingdom survey of 7 major sites technology back-end was interesting in the commonality between sites and trends;
"As could have been guessed, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is by far the most common setup of the surveyed websites. The dominance is far from total, though, and the elements of LAMP are all challenged by alternatives that are growing in popularity."
Penguin the most popular server animal
Apache serves the most pages
MySQL dominates the databases
PHP rules server-side scripting
Clustering for reliability and performance
Going against the grain
- Meebo with Lighttpd
- Alexaholic with Windows, IIS and MS SQL Server
Server-side Java with Apache Tomcat
Different needs = different setups
- TechCrunch has 2 servers
- YouSendIt has 170 file servers split between the U.S. east and west coast just to deliver files.
- Vimeo has 100 content delivery servers for the sole purpose of streaming video.
- Meebo has more than 40 web servers to handle their AJAX-based messaging application
- FeedBurner uses 70 web servers and 15 database servers to, pardon the pun, feed its feeds.
“The greatest challenge was finding the most efficient ways to locate hotspots and bottlenecks in the application,” says Joseph Kottke (FeedBurner.)
I'm regularly asked similar questions, as do most entrepreneurs in these types of businesses. Having spent enough time in large online co's to know how new product development and tech platforms work, the real question is how long it takes LargeCo to go from A What They Have (ie nothing in designated space x) to B (what they perceive u have.) In LargeCo it's always hard to go from good .ppt idea to working live approved project. To get through the board, management, functional heads, politics, tech team and so on.
My experience of new product development in the majors (at least locally, which is underweight in engineers and new products) it takes 12 months usually more, with more time in planning and approval than in tech development hours. The best ideas also never make it. You also can't go back in time. So playing catchup is alot harder than starting out in front, but then you can be too early and prove that the opportunity is not big enough.
A standalone product also does not need to take into account legacy systems, billing, CRM, and a whole raft of issues startups don't even look at. (this is also often why acquisitions get run as standalone businesses for so long and integration often doesn't happen or when it does, it pretty much means everything was rebuilt)
In different acquisition cases, the technology is what is of interest, in others the audience, and then there is the management team. Often it's all three. (flickr would be a good example of this) The Pingdom survey of 7 major sites technology back-end was interesting in the commonality between sites and trends;
"As could have been guessed, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is by far the most common setup of the surveyed websites. The dominance is far from total, though, and the elements of LAMP are all challenged by alternatives that are growing in popularity."
Penguin the most popular server animal
Apache serves the most pages
MySQL dominates the databases
PHP rules server-side scripting
Clustering for reliability and performance
Going against the grain
- Meebo with Lighttpd
- Alexaholic with Windows, IIS and MS SQL Server
Server-side Java with Apache Tomcat
Different needs = different setups
- TechCrunch has 2 servers
- YouSendIt has 170 file servers split between the U.S. east and west coast just to deliver files.
- Vimeo has 100 content delivery servers for the sole purpose of streaming video.
- Meebo has more than 40 web servers to handle their AJAX-based messaging application
- FeedBurner uses 70 web servers and 15 database servers to, pardon the pun, feed its feeds.
“The greatest challenge was finding the most efficient ways to locate hotspots and bottlenecks in the application,” says Joseph Kottke (FeedBurner.)
posted by redbarren at 11:38 AM
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