[HN Gopher] Zimki, the world's first Platform as a Service that ...
___________________________________________________________________
Zimki, the world's first Platform as a Service that belonged to
Canon
Author : sungrokshim
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-08-19 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.porter.run)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.porter.run)
| webmaven wrote:
| Simon Wardley has continued to evolve and refine the insights
| that led him to conceiving Zimki, and it is well worth any tech
| entrepreneur's time to take a look at the current iteration of
| "Wardley Mapping" to better understand how technologies (and
| platforms) evolve:
|
| https://learnwardleymapping.com/book/
|
| If Blank and Ries transformed our understanding of startup
| _tactics_ , Wardley is improving our understanding of _strategy_.
|
| Simon's account of the Zimki episode is in Chapter 5, if you just
| want a bit more detail: https://medium.com/wardleymaps/the-play-
| and-a-decision-to-ac...
| simonw wrote:
| Zimki was SO far ahead of its time - it was at least five years
| too early. Server-side JavaScript, Heroku-style PaaS, with its
| own object storage - back in 2006.
|
| I was at the 2007 OSCON where Simon Wardley resigned on-stage
| after Canon changed their mind on open sourcing it. That was
| quite a moment!
| webmaven wrote:
| Same here.
| sungrokshim wrote:
| Must have been incredible to see that unfold in real time... I
| can only imagine!
| webmaven wrote:
| It was a bit anticlimactic. Think about it, there was
| supposed to be a major new (and Open Source) platform
| announcement, and instead we got a resignation with very few
| details.
| alberth wrote:
| > " One of the very first PaaS offerings in history actually
| belonged to Canon ... until it was abruptly killed by Canon
| itself"
|
| There are dozens of examples of people being first to market and
| not winning (Canon). As so, what's so interesting about this
| article?
|
| - Facebook won, when MySpace and others were first to market
|
| - Google won, and it was crazy late to market over
| Yahoo/Altavista/Excite.
|
| - Starbucks won, when plenty of other national coffee chains
| existed
|
| etc
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Facebook won, when MySpace and others were first to market
|
| Facebook had a valuable userbase and a polished product (it
| looked good, no templates and music on auto-play)
|
| > Google won, and it was crazy late to market over
| Yahoo/Altavista/Excite.
|
| Google had a better product, plain simple.
|
| > Starbucks won, when plenty of other national coffee chains
| existed
|
| Starbucks won partly because it had "Italian coffee". Nobody
| else had espresso machines in as many locations as they did.
| toast0 wrote:
| What's an example of being first to market and winning a big
| market?
|
| I can't think of any. First to market isn't the advantage that
| people think it is. It might be more important for smaller
| markets, perhaps.
| krasin wrote:
| Bell Telephone Company was first to the market and won. It's
| now known as AT&T.
| kube-system wrote:
| > It's now known as AT&T.
|
| ... and Verizon, and a few others.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The first commercial power plant in the US became
| Consolidated Edison which is still going 140 years later with
| a market cap of $27 billion.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| Netflix, Uber, Amazon, PayPal, etc?
|
| It's hard to exactly define "first to market." Was Google
| first to market because they were the first to have a search
| engine that functioned in the way theirs did, and should we
| put more primitive search engines in the same category?
|
| Was Dropbox first to market? Did they win the market?
|
| It often feels like a company is first to market, and then
| they win that market... and then maybe five or ten years
| later, an innovation comes along from a new company and they
| lose the market. That's just the way the market is supposed
| to work, and natural, but there's still an advantage to being
| first to market in having those years of market dominance.
| kube-system wrote:
| It depends on how you define the market. I think it's
| pretty hard to say Google was first to any market with any
| reasonable definition. They're an example of how you don't
| have to be first if you are better. Even if you define the
| early Google market as a "natural language web crawler
| search engines", they weren't the first.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Netflix, Uber, Amazon, PayPal, etc?
|
| Not sure if Netflix was first to DVD by mail, quite
| possibly; they were early, and I don't know if VHS rental
| by mail was ever a thing.
|
| Uber may have been the first to internet hail livery
| vehicles, but Sidecar was the first to do internet
| ridesharing as an app, and Lyft was the first to call
| unlicensed taxi service ridesharing. Uber is winning in the
| marketplace at the moment though and Sidecar is dead; of
| course, winning in this market still means burning money.
|
| Amazon was early to selling books on the web, but
| e-commerce catalog sales were available on pre-Internet
| information services. AWS defined a new category of managed
| hosting, but lots of other companies did similar things
| before.
|
| I think BillPoint may have slightly predated PayPal. Being
| early here seems to have had staying power, as Yahoo's
| PayDirect didn't do well enough to stick around. Otoh,
| Venmo was good enough to buy, Zelle seems popular, and
| other easy credit card processors like Square and such seem
| to be winning over that side of PayPal's market. There's a
| moat, but it's not very deep.
|
| > Was Dropbox first to market? Did they win the market?
|
| No, there was XDrive and Yahoo Briefcase and probably more
| that launched and shutdown before Dropbox. Not sure if
| Dropbox won, OneDrive and Google Drive are contenders
| still.
| webmaven wrote:
| In general, the examples you cite are of early entrants being
| outcompeted by later entrants. Zimki was shut down despite (or
| because of?) it's success and experiencing he initial stages of
| hypergrowth. The successful PaaS entrants didn't show up until
| after Zimki had been defunct for a while.
|
| You could also characterize this as "innovative startup
| strangled by acquiring behemoth or clueless greedy investors"
| which brings to mind a different set of examples, but that's
| not much more interesting.
|
| What makes Zimki interesting IMO is that Simon Wardley
| successfully "timed the market" of technological change,
| clearly explained his thinking, and has since applied the same
| logic to make other correct predictions (or give good strategic
| advice).
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Wow - interesting story.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-19 23:00 UTC)