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On October 20 2026 08:42 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On October 20 2026 08:03 Jeremy Reimer wrote:On October 20 2026 05:57 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
I watched five guys take down Microsoft SharePoint. That's the biggest David versus Goliath win I've ever seen in my career. I mean, given the quality of Microsoft SharePoint, I'm surprised it took more than two guys and a dog. in 2010 it was 1000 people at MS versus 5 guys at a little know competitor.
But that's Microsoft in a nutshell. They put 1,000 people on a project and together they shit out a giant turd. But it makes money anyway because people get it bundled with their computers, or bundled with the software that gets bundled with their computers.
I'd bet on the five guys every time, providing they have some way of getting their software to users.
Back in the early 90s, it only took two guys to make a product that utterly destroyed Microsoft's offerings:
At least according to one Claris marketing presentation I saw, ClarisWorks was outselling Microsoft Office (presumably by units, not revenue).
People really don't have a good sense of just how terrible Microsoft products are. And Sharepoint was the worst product in their entire lineup. It might actually be the worst piece of commercial software ever written.
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SharePoint was $5,000 per server and $200 per user.
By the end of 2010 Microsoft had sold 61 million SharePoint licenses.
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On October 20 2026 12:54 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
SharePoint was $5,000 per server and $200 per user.
By the end of 2010 Microsoft had sold 61 million SharePoint licenses.
And all 61 million of them were absolute shit, and did a shit job at whatever the hell it was Sharepoint was supposed to do.
It did nothing useful, did it badly, and it was super expensive.
Pointy-haired managers loved it!
One of the co-owners of the company I worked for from 2007-2012 once went to a Microsoft conference and got the full Sharepoint religion. He insisted that his new product idea absolutely had to be built with it. Doing so was such a horrifying experience for the developers that it nearly destroyed the entire company. Silver lining, though: the disaster convinced the other owner to buy this idiot out and kick him out of the company forever. So Sharepoint was good for one thing, at least!
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Just transport me back to the days of trying to play Rogue Spear on a toaster. Straight into my goddamn veins. LAN gaming or kill me. Kill me anyway.
Anyway I think it's extremely difficult to make new cultural hits. It's not always the mal-intent of developers. It's hard to surprise and titillate for so many reasons, to stay focused and not compromise and to actually have the necessary fodder to produce good, legit art and not shitty vanilla products, especially if you're trained mostly as a technician and live a very comfortable life. Just how it goes.
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Holy shit though just to rag on Arkhenonh for a second I've seen a couple clips and I have NO idea what's going on. I feel like I should be able to point out a character I want to play but it's like witch doctors doing karate with huge numbers on the screen wtf
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On October 21 2026 01:01 Mrs Crabbleman wrote:
Holy shit though just to rag on Arkhenonh for a second I've seen a couple clips and I have NO idea what's going on. I feel like I should be able to point out a character I want to play but it's like witch doctors doing karate with huge numbers on the screen wtf
I watched a clip of people playing Arkheron (Akerhon?) and felt exactly the same thing. Then after a while I felt mildly dizzy. Then I stopped watching clips of the game forever.
Maybe the experience of actually playing the game is better, but I'll never find out. In the Age of Twitch, this seems like an unrecoverable mistake.
But then again, it's only at version 0.23! Let them cook! Forever!
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On October 20 2026 14:13 Jeremy Reimer wrote:Show nested quote +On October 20 2026 12:54 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
SharePoint was $5,000 per server and $200 per user.
By the end of 2010 Microsoft had sold 61 million SharePoint licenses.
And all 61 million of them were absolute shit, and did a shit job at whatever the hell it was Sharepoint was supposed to do. It did nothing useful, did it badly, and it was super expensive. Pointy-haired managers loved it! One of the co-owners of the company I worked for from 2007-2012 once went to a Microsoft conference and got the full Sharepoint religion. He insisted that his new product idea absolutely had to be built with it. Doing so was such a horrifying experience for the developers that it nearly destroyed the entire company. Silver lining, though: the disaster convinced the other owner to buy this idiot out and kick him out of the company forever. So Sharepoint was good for one thing, at least!
SharePoint was a "run your entire IT infrastructure on a web portal" technology. Even documenting business processes.
As far as David versus Goliath.
I kinda did the same thing with Crystal Reports in 2011. I have no idea how Crystal Reports got so popular. I took Stonefield Reports which is probably what Crystal was supposed to be.... Made it in C# and changed it by about 10%.
The sales Strategy was just to convert existing Crystal Reports shops. We landed new customers based on how badly Crystal Reports had just fucked over the place. I'd be adding all these cool new features thinking it would help us break in to new places ... And new features were never the deciding factor. The bigger the Crystal Reports failure the better the chance they'd buy my reporting software.
My grandfather's brother worked on IBM's RPG3 (Report Program Generator) in the 1970s. We have a real family lineage going on!
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On October 21 2026 04:33 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
SharePoint was a "run your entire IT infrastructure on a web portal" technology. Even documenting business processes.
It was the worst at doing that. Sure, populate a whole column of this slow-ass web page with links to dozens of nearly-identical Word documents, that will keep things organized!
As far as David versus Goliath.
I kinda did the same thing with Crystal Reports in 2011. I have no idea how Crystal Reports got so popular. I took Stonefield Reports which is probably what Crystal was supposed to be.... Made it in C# and changed it by about 10%.
Crystal Reports was hot garbage. I was asked to evaluate it once at work. Of course managers love the idea of Crystal Reports, they love the idea of sitting in their big office and clicking one button and seeing a whole bunch of graphs that let them Intelligently Make Intelligent Decisions.
After about ten minutes of trying to use it, I never wanted to use it again. And I never did. I did write a custom web-based report generator to make a graph for that one thing the manager actually wanted to see. It took me about half a day. He was delighted at first, but like most managers he got distracted by other shiny things.
My grandfather's brother worked on IBM's RPG3 (Report Program Generator) in the 1970s. We have a real family lineage going on!
Hilariously, my wife's younger cousin was programming in RPG for a bank only a few years ago.
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On October 21 2026 07:57 Jeremy Reimer wrote:Show nested quote +
My grandfather's brother worked on IBM's RPG3 (Report Program Generator) in the 1970s. We have a real family lineage going on!
Hilariously, my wife's younger cousin was programming in RPG for a bank only a few years ago.
"It was admirable... it was the old stuff." , Ricky Roma , GlenGary Glen Ross.
right now, my game rotation is the 1982 Activision Atari 2600 line up. River Raid, Chopper Command, MegaMania , Robot Tank.
I love getting to a new wave I've never seen before in Megamania to see what they will look like and what they will do.
Adding the concept that the fighter ship at the bottom of the screen is limited by "Energy" was a stroke of brilliance.
Did you ever see original 1982 Activision Robot Tank Ad? It predicted the Pandemic and Donald Trump's election.
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Crazy that an ad from 1982 would predict Elon musk controlling robot warriors considering he would be like 11 years olds at the time! would almost make someone think its fake!
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On October 21 2026 23:41 iamperfection wrote:
Crazy that an ad from 1982 would predict Elon musk controlling robot warriors considering he would be like 11 years olds at the time! would almost make someone think its fake!
Musk taught himself computer programming at approximately age 10 and, at age 12, created a video game called Blastar, which he sold to a computer magazine for approximately $500.
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On October 21 2026 23:41 iamperfection wrote:
Crazy that an ad from 1982 would predict Elon musk controlling robot warriors considering he would be like 11 years olds at the time! would almost make someone think its fake!
Here's the original:
Photoshop was the original menace that was going to destroy all truth in the world, years before generative AI was a thing.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/iyyp86j.png)
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/ZO8t5yU.jpeg)
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/A425NUK.jpeg)
