So, what you're saying is there's tons of technologies lying around that are a solid UI and some extra features away from being valuable to normal people. But somehow doing those things and making lots of money is bad?
No, of course not. Neither adding some minor extra features (that make a huge difference for the end-user) nor profiting from it is bad. My concern was that there is so much good tech that is not being utilized just because it lacks enterprisey look and marketing attention.
Take slack as an example: ircd with logging enabled + elastic search/sphinx/lucene + web frontend (use any existing web irc client and integrate that with elastic search results). MVP really seems as a one guy one weekend project. And that was lying underutilized for decades. While my original comment was just a snarky remark, I really think that there are other areas where such a (relatively) simple MVP could allow huge productivity boost to many businesses and allow them to use an existing tool that right now is just too hard/too complicated to use by a wide audience.
And of course the market will reward those that will find the right solution and come up with a great UX improvement to that tech. The hard part is creating the GUI that is both efficient and easy-enough , and the hardest part is of course finding the right tool and the right problem to solve.
(edit: formatting)
> ircd with logging enabled + elastic search/sphinx/lucene + web frontend
Slack is way more than that, though.
My recollection is that even the initial version of Slack was more than that.
At this point, it's enough that "let's extend ircd" isn't exactly a practical answer. Either they maintain their own incompatible fork of ircd or they try to force their business desires into the irc protocol.
There's plenty of things that are "just X plus some paint" if you don't look at them deeply. That usually does an extreme disservice to the difficulty of the "plus some paint" part, and often represents a failure to understand the features involved.
While you are obviously right, I still believe that the MVP one weekend project I described in parent post would still cover a large fraction of use-cases. You could then improve on that and add some "minor" (minor in the sense of dev-time) improvements like syntax highlighting using some free (as in beer) libs for that.
I am not trying to imply that I could "clone" Slack over the weekend by putting together ircd+elastic and then adding some JS cruft on top of that. But I do imply that just that would be enough as an MVP and as something that would make usage of self-hosted IRC possible for a wider, non-technical audience. I also believe that this itself would cover the functionality actually used by many slack users (at least my personal anecdata from 8 smallish companies supports that)
And I also can't stress this enough: I am not trying to say that Slack was created over the weekend or devalue a really impressive and massive effort they've put to get the scale, the functionality and the UX.
Take slack as an example: ircd with logging enabled + elastic search/sphinx/lucene + web frontend (use any existing web irc client and integrate that with elastic search results). MVP really seems as a one guy one weekend project. And that was lying underutilized for decades. While my original comment was just a snarky remark, I really think that there are other areas where such a (relatively) simple MVP could allow huge productivity boost to many businesses and allow them to use an existing tool that right now is just too hard/too complicated to use by a wide audience.
And of course the market will reward those that will find the right solution and come up with a great UX improvement to that tech. The hard part is creating the GUI that is both efficient and easy-enough , and the hardest part is of course finding the right tool and the right problem to solve. (edit: formatting)