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.
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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.