Who's Your Arch-Enemy?

I have to admit that when you announced stackoverflow I thought it would just be another shitty QA site for the pile, but it is actually very useful.

There is nothing like having a goal to aim for. Without it, you’re just a ship without a navigational system, drifting aimlessly at sea.

I’m working on a .NET version of all those god-awful tools Sun releases for working with Oracle databases. You know–those tools that are written in Java. The SLOW ones. The needlessly slow ones. The bloated, needlessly slow ones. The bloated, needlessly slow ones that won’t let you view more than one object at a time, and constrain the number of rows you can select. And so on. Yeah, great tools.

So, my quest is to design a great tool in C# for querying Oracle databases and their metadata really, really fast. Oracle, without the suck.

And for the record, I turn every developer and teammate I can onto StackOverflow. It’s the best thing to come around since, well, refactoring tools.

Using Google to find an answer you need is like rooting through a landfill trying to find the Action Comics #1 your mom threw out ages ago because she thought it was useless. Going to StackOverflow to find an answer you need is like having a personal legion of information experts hovering right over your shoulder.

Vid cards from a certain hardware vendor. Costly enough to have users expecting to run everything on it. Successful enough to take in consideration. Slimy enough to turn bug workarounding in a full-time job.

Graphics from another vendor is worse but at least users seem to understand why they spent so little for their last generation laptop.

Category error. The ability to download every single sodding byte of Wikipedia does not make it open and does not make it free.

Where are you quoting free from? As for the open, yeah, the database is open (hey, I actually said that) in every sense of the word. Category? Huh? You’re having an argument with your imagination.

And the point of Wikipedia having an open database is that it removes the lock-in – if tomorrow Jimmy decided to make it a pay subscription site, someone else can spool up a competitive Wikipedia using all of the information that the commons contributed, and which Wikipedia has no claim or exclusivity over. For sites built on user contributions, it’s something that I think should be demanded nowadays. People should have learned by now how these things turn.

I wonder if I’m gonna see that picture used on Facebook now to tag people… :stuck_out_tongue:

@Fernando: A friend of mine did that. Didn’t make him rich but sales were definitely good.

Until someone made a program ‘like his, without all the evil’…

Whilst I can see where you and 37 signals are coming from, Iím not sure if itís the healthiest approach. You really want to be thinking about them as rivals rather than enemies. That is, you want your product to be better than the alternatives, not the opposite.

The problem with thinking about your rival as your enemy is that you get into a mindset that can see nothing in their product, and completely underestimate them as a threat. Adding a moral element to the picture only makes the complacency worse; of course no-one will buy the rival product ñ itís evil.

My arch enemy is the evil Dr. Caligari.

My arch enemy is http://www.librarything.com/

they are good guys but their service just does no help you keep track of your reading like http://www.booksiamreading.com/ does.

With the death of interruption marketing the snake oil salesmen have to get their twisted minds around social media and viral techniques.

If you are using friends and customers to market your products then forget facts and figures and explore the world of storytelling.

Start with the evil web services monopolist, boo! enter our dashing hero ;_0)

@anon: You have to take into account people complaining about actual stack overflows. :slight_smile:

I wonder if I can selectively apply the enemy motivator on a micro-scale and make a poorly designed feature in my own application the enemy of a new approach. What is Foo Manager? Well, you know our customers really hate Bar Manager, so we’re scraping it and replacing it with Foo Manager.

Or does that just create inter-team rivalries or perhaps lead to throwing out the good with the bad?

Saturn (the car company) is currently running an ad campaign that says, Nothing sells Saturns better than letting our customers test-drive a GM.

http://sucks-rocks.com/rate/experts+exchange/stack+overflow

Another word for this is capitalism.

If you think about it, youtube had competition from all the quicktime and real media crap. Back then streaming video was a pain in the ass, even more easy than beating up EE.

Isn’t this just called competition? I’m not sure what the point here is.

@Mike Hofer - I’m really interested in that project you are working on. I have to deal with the stupid Oracle tools on a weekly basis. In the future you may want to type in your website when you post so we can check out the project. Thanks!

Another thing Experts-Exchange did wrong was selecting their name. They now HAVE to put the hyphen in it and capitalize the E, because without that, their name is easily read as: Expert-sex-change

It’s gotta be Billy Joel! The evil-genius of rock…