03 June 2008

two very important quotes about software industry

they seem to be about Netscape, AOL and time-line of "Netscape Navigator"-then-Mozilla projects in first place... but removing particular company & projects names makes it into different dimension.

Why? Because the company stopped innovating. The company got big, and big companies just aren't creative. There exist counterexamples to this, but in general, great things are accomplished by small groups of people who are driven, who have unity of purpose. The more people involved, the slower and stupider their union is.


And there's another factor involved, which is that you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape's early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter.
bold selections are mine.

nomo zilla, resignation and postmortem © 1999 by Jamie Zawinski, Author of Netscape Navigator, "used to be a hacker, now run a nightclub."

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