The argument ingnores a fact that if netscape did not take off and be popular, microsoft might not ever consider buying spyglass browser and expanded it into IE (Eric Sink led the spyglass team, with his memoir http://www.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html) and waged browser war in late 90s.
What all software architects forget is, most of time, the piece of code that we wrote is to solve problems in life. Those problems have their life cycles; some are long, some are short. While we seems like to imagine the piece that we wrote will be a masterpiece as a Cathedral/Pyramid and last for 1000 years. Unfortunately that is not the case. Most of time, our programs are just solutions among solutions to a series of bootstrapping problems. So unless we have a lousy but popular solution to a problem, our potential competitors might just ignored a market and no progress happened for the field. And this is a lost to human progress.
It is the same as maintaining old buildings, if condition is right, you may just tear it down and rebuild what you deem is fit by today's standard. But don't forget the original building has served its purpose.
Edit:
I personally have affection for Netscape 1.0. I still remembered how people in my lab in Taipei ftped to netscape's download server and waited for the moment when they uploaded the tgz file and started to download it and installed it on Sun workstations. And by using it I felt making stuffs on internet is better than studying physics and the decision changed my life.
Obviously Netscape created a revolution. The "duct-tape" approach allowed them to iterate quickly and deliver Netscape 1.0 to the masses and change the world.
However, the rapid success of Netscape was very much due to that the basic architecture and protocols of the web was already designed by others. I give Netscape credit for the <img> tag, but apart from that, almost anything Netscape designed on their own were ill-conceived disasters from <font> and <frameset> to <layer> and JSSS.
So I think the correction to the duct-tape approach is that it works best if somebody else already designed the basic architecture, e.g. if you are copying an already established product. It does not seem to work very well if you have to design something original.
Comments
The argument ingnores a fact that if netscape did not take off and be popular, microsoft might not ever consider buying spyglass browser and expanded it into IE (Eric Sink led the spyglass team, with his memoir http://www.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html) and waged browser war in late 90s.
What all software architects forget is, most of time, the piece of code that we wrote is to solve problems in life. Those problems have their life cycles; some are long, some are short. While we seems like to imagine the piece that we wrote will be a masterpiece as a Cathedral/Pyramid and last for 1000 years. Unfortunately that is not the case. Most of time, our programs are just solutions among solutions to a series of bootstrapping problems. So unless we have a lousy but popular solution to a problem, our potential competitors might just ignored a market and no progress happened for the field. And this is a lost to human progress.
It is the same as maintaining old buildings, if condition is right, you may just tear it down and rebuild what you deem is fit by today's standard. But don't forget the original building has served its purpose.
Edit:
I personally have affection for Netscape 1.0. I still remembered how people in my lab in Taipei ftped to netscape's download server and waited for the moment when they uploaded the tgz file and started to download it and installed it on Sun workstations. And by using it I felt making stuffs on internet is better than studying physics and the decision changed my life.
Obviously Netscape created a revolution. The "duct-tape" approach allowed them to iterate quickly and deliver Netscape 1.0 to the masses and change the world.
However, the rapid success of Netscape was very much due to that the basic architecture and protocols of the web was already designed by others. I give Netscape credit for the <img> tag, but apart from that, almost anything Netscape designed on their own were ill-conceived disasters from <font> and <frameset> to <layer> and JSSS.
So I think the correction to the duct-tape approach is that it works best if somebody else already designed the basic architecture, e.g. if you are copying an already established product. It does not seem to work very well if you have to design something original.