2010-01-19
post/342515781
quote 11:07:32
“ For consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology. Much has been written about how the cloud, accessible web frameworks, etc. have dramatically lowered the cost of getting a startup to market, and that’s certainly true, but it also means that since everyone is on EC2 and Ruby on Rails, technology is no longer what differentiates most consumer web apps. What does is design. ”
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, talking about Tumblr vs Posterous (via knaveofdiamonds)
I’d take issue with the “everyone is on EC2 and RoR” part. While the EC2 bit feels right for new projects - everything I worked on at Six to Start over the last year has been hosted there - I’d argue there’s a good selection of Django and PHP+framework apps as well as Rails ones. As for the older social networks, most of them use PHP; Flickr, Facebook and Delicious, for example.
Still, I think the general point is correct: given a decent framework and a good developer, prototyping and even scaling are now much better understood, and available, than they were five (or even three) years ago. How your service works, however, is still a key selling point.
