toolkit. In some cases, they’d heard from Edward Tufte in his lectures.
People would ask, “What’s good on the Web?” and he’d say, “Nothing’s good on
the Web,” and they’d say, “C’mon, give us two good websites.” And one of the
ones he’d mention would be photo.net as an example with good design.
But most of the business was because we’d released free open source software.
The 15-year-olds would just use it, and the big companies would decide
that, since they had so much money and I guess not enough good programmers,
it made sense for them to pay us to help them out with it.
Livingston: What was unique about ArsDigita?
Greenspun: We tried to help each programmer develop an independent, professional
reputation. We had this idea that programmers could be professionals,
like doctors or lawyers, and, to that end, we wanted the programmers to be real
engineers—to sit down face to face with the customer, find out what was
needed, come up with some suggestions or changes based on the programmer’s
experience with similar services, and then take a lot of responsibility for making
it happen.
We pushed the profit-and-loss responsibility down to individual teams. For
example, if there were two or three programmers working for Hewlett-
Packard, then those guys would be solely responsible for the project and making
sure that it got delivered on time and that the customer was happy. They’d
get a big bonus if they did a good job and the customer was happy and the thing
was profitable. Implicit in that was that, if it didn’t go well, we’d know whom to
blame.
Livingston: What were some of the biggest turning points?
Greenspun: One big turning point was getting Levi Strauss as a customer. They
had acquired a small company that made custom-cut khaki pants, and they
wanted a web front end for this new factory that they were building that could
take your measurements and sew you a pair of khakis to your specs. They asked
around MIT, “Who’s really an expert on building this kind of thing?” They came
to us and it was a happy coincidence, because they were happy to pay for lots of
software and infrastructure and tools and let us keep the rights to it all.
That was one good thing about working for non-technical companies. If
you worked for IBM, they make their money by owning technologies, so if you
build a technology for them, they want to own it. Whereas publishers or clothing
companies, they make their money by having a brand or unique content. I
did a lot of work for Hearst Corporation and they don’t want to give away the

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