Comment by dave1619 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dave1619 | Hacker News Reader

I know the guys at 37Signals are a smart pack, but I don't understand their hangup with Instagram and Pinterest... and apparently FB (esp. their older posts). FB has proven to be able to make $billions of revenue and substantial profit, and is only growing. Isn't that proof that an ad-based model can work if it's large enough?

Instagram was FB's biggest competitor... huge growth and huge adoption amongst young groups of friends. FB was smart to buy them.

Pinterest... I'm less bullish on. I can see how they can make money with affiliate commissions on products and such. But I just don't see Everyone using this. Pinterest at $1.5billion might be over-valued for where it's at. But then again, I don't have privy to their internal numbers (ie., traction, metrics, retention, etc). But, I can see Pinterest be worth a lot in the future, just right now I'm not sure about the $1.5b.

FB, Instagram and maybe Pinterest are amazing companies with crazy traction. They're all riding on the huge distribution channels of our day (web, mobile, social) and have reached or are close to reaching the 100+million users mark (for FB is the 1+billion user mark). Any service that can garner 100s of millions of users can find a way to monetize. How much in monetization is another story, but I wouldn't bet against them to create some substantial value.

They're probably hung up because it's making them look small-time. What do 37Signals actually do, other than generate a steady stream of blog posts for HN? They make some sort of dropbox knockoff, right?

TODO and project management apps for small business. Unfortunately their success has gone to their heads.

Couldn't upvote this more.

Rails was groundbreaking. Yes. DHH did something great but that's now 7 or 8 (!) years ago. Rails has aged, DHH showed often how opinionated he can be and that he just isn't perfect. And the 37signals products live primarily because of DHH's and Rails' reputation and not because there are outstanding (there tons of better Basecamps out there).

Still DHH is a smart guy but a Kevin Systrom who built a company, who learned how to build a scalable backend while starting this company and then sold this company after just 2 years for 1 billion achieved something special as well and this should be appreciated instead of ranting. This is just infantile and shows once again DHH's temper and lack of self-control.

They invented Ruby on Rails.

Yeah, DHH invented Rails and has shepherded the project to be a dominant player in the web framework world. Really, you could credit him with all the copycat frameworks like Django as well and a good percentage of the other frameworks that reproduced significant innovations introduced in Rails. He's no Linus, but he was a huge force for technological innovation back in the mid-to-late 200x years and maybe a few weeks ago.

But what has he done for us haters lately? I say we hang him. Maybe we should pluck his fingernails out first for making HN members up-vote his blog post.

Leaving aside your sarcasm, Django was more a matter of convergent evolution—it was developed concurrently with Rails and just released slightly later—and both frameworks have copied a lot of awesome innovations from each other.

I don't think that's fair. I really worked hard on the sarcasm part.

About the Django part... yeah, I've heard that said, but the fact is that Rails was first and most of the cool parts of Django are things that they ended up doing like Rails.

Having used both, my opinion is that even today Django didn't understand some of the core ways that Rails was superior so didn't copy the right things. So yeah, Django was around and can sort of claim some concurrency with Rails development and I'm sure it even influenced Rails in small ways.

In terms of leading in a new paradigm, though, Rails did it. Django didn't.

Django is the Ringo of the greatness of the Beatles. Sure, Ringo was there swinging his sticks and even wrote a couple of catchy tunes. Sure, he contributed in his own small ways... but seriously he wasn't the leader and he wasn't the secret ingredient to the band's phenomenal success.

Many of the cool parts of Rails are things they ended up doing like Django, too. ActiveAdmin, say. You might not remember how limited Rails was when it first came out, even though it was still obviously The Right Thing.

Any service that can garner 100s of millions of users can find a way to monetize.

I heard people say this a thousand times in 1999. I doubt it's any more true now than it was then.

In 1999 I think they were talking about millions or tens of millions of users, not hundreds of millions. The order of magnitude makes a difference. So does the existence of Google AdSense and its competitors.

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