interesting response from groove chief product designer regarding comments made in joel’s recent screed, Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You:
“The bottom line is that I think it was unfair of you to consider us Architecture Astronauts. It is true that we do not solve the problem that Napster was trying to solve, but I think we have been successful at solving the problem that we set out to solve. Also, to be fair, we have managed to ship a product (and even sell it to people) unlike some of the Architecture Astronauts that you are thinking of.”
joel responds:
“Anyway, now we’re talking about architecture. Let’s talk about features. The applets you ship with are all spiffy but not ultra-compelling, because you can often get the same functionality elsewhere. And it’s the applets that are going to sell Groove, not the architecture…So… yes, you shipped a product, and sold it to people, it’s great, I believe you. But if you want it to be The Next Great Thing it has to be more than architecture, it has to enable things that people really need.”
i might be missing something, but i presumed that groove’s product was supposed to be a framework and that they weren’t trying to get into the application space, so they didn’t compete with the people that they are trying to sell to. i assumed that the stripped down functionality provided by the preview release was meant only as a teaser to entice others to develop the things that people really need. am i missing something? probably.