and whoever else uses Microsoft Word.
That works pretty well for word processors because it’s a product that was
developed in the ’60s by IBM, and people are pretty sure of what the minimum
features should be in a word processor. It also works pretty well because people
don’t demand frequent upgrades. There aren’t new requirements and new ideas
coming out in word processors, so if you have a release every three years, that’s
just fine. It doesn’t hurt that Microsoft has a monopoly and there’s no competition,
so if it takes them 4 years instead of 3, it doesn’t make any difference.
Philip Greenspun 323
They applied the same technique to SharePoint. They had to do some
research. They looked at Vignette, Broadvision, the ArsDigita Community
System, a few other things, and they said, “These are some features that we
think we should have.” The product managers spec SharePoint, they send it out
after about a year or two of development, and customers don’t like it. It’s too
hard to program; it’s too hard to understand. So they interview people, find out
what they don’t like, refine it. It takes them years and years.
If you don’t have any way of seeing how your customers are using the software
except by shipping them the CD and then standing in the back of their
living room while they type, maybe this is a reasonable way to develop software.
But if you have the capacity to just install it on the server and essentially look
over their shoulders by looking at the web server log and seeing what kind of
complaints they email to the help desk or the website, then why not do that?
You can shortcut the whole 2-year development cycle down to maybe 2 months.
We would have releases every 2 or 3 months.
So we worried about competitors, but it was an unreasonable fear. As a
friend once pointed out, most gunshot wounds are self-inflicted.
Livingston: ArsDigita was different because it was much faster?
Greenspun: Yeah. If you look at a book on how to develop software, it will
always have this long cycle with all these people involved. It’s very slow because
it’s predicated on the fact that you can’t just watch people as they use your running
system—which you can do on the Web.
Livingston: You had an interesting culture at ArsDigita. Was it part of your
strategy to get these young, really good hackers who could develop themselves
professionally? And did you know that they likely had friends who were really
good hackers who you could recruit?
Greenspun: That was part of it; it was hard to hire people. No matter what you

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