We see dead projects (Friends)
Episode
78 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Startups, Fundraising & VC, Leadership
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Google's Project Graveyard: Killed by Google catalogs 298 discontinued products including Google Reader (2005-2013), which not only died itself but effectively killed RSS as a mass-market technology, leaving only niche users with alternatives like Feed Bin and Feedly still using RSS feeds today.
- ✓Meteor JS Trajectory: Raised $31 million across seed and Series B rounds, built full-stack JavaScript framework with thousands of community packages, but parent company MDG pivoted to Apollo GraphQL in 2019, selling Meteor assets to Tiny Capital for maintenance mode rather than continued growth and innovation.
- ✓RethinkDB Market Failure: Founder Slava Akhmechet identified two fatal mistakes: choosing the wrong market and optimizing for correctness, simplicity, and consistency instead of what customers actually valued. Company declared bankruptcy in 2016, unable to compete against MongoDB's dominant NoSQL market position and adoption.
- ✓Sass Preprocessor Evolution: LibSass reached official end-of-life October 2024 after five years of deprecation. Originally created to add variables and nesting to CSS, Sass successfully pushed features into native CSS itself, making the preprocessor obsolete as modern CSS now includes these capabilities built-in.
- ✓Quicksilver's First-Mover Disadvantage: Released 2003 as Mac app launcher with extensibility and combinability features, remained in beta for ten years. Apple absorbed core functionality into Spotlight while competitors like Launch Bar, Alfred, and Raycast captured users, demonstrating innovation leadership doesn't guarantee market success.
What It Covers
The hosts explore defunct software projects including Google Reader, Meteor JS, RethinkDB, Quicksilver, and Sass, examining why popular open source and venture-backed projects fail through market competition, poor timing, and strategic missteps.
Key Questions Answered
- •Google's Project Graveyard: Killed by Google catalogs 298 discontinued products including Google Reader (2005-2013), which not only died itself but effectively killed RSS as a mass-market technology, leaving only niche users with alternatives like Feed Bin and Feedly still using RSS feeds today.
- •Meteor JS Trajectory: Raised $31 million across seed and Series B rounds, built full-stack JavaScript framework with thousands of community packages, but parent company MDG pivoted to Apollo GraphQL in 2019, selling Meteor assets to Tiny Capital for maintenance mode rather than continued growth and innovation.
- •RethinkDB Market Failure: Founder Slava Akhmechet identified two fatal mistakes: choosing the wrong market and optimizing for correctness, simplicity, and consistency instead of what customers actually valued. Company declared bankruptcy in 2016, unable to compete against MongoDB's dominant NoSQL market position and adoption.
- •Sass Preprocessor Evolution: LibSass reached official end-of-life October 2024 after five years of deprecation. Originally created to add variables and nesting to CSS, Sass successfully pushed features into native CSS itself, making the preprocessor obsolete as modern CSS now includes these capabilities built-in.
- •Quicksilver's First-Mover Disadvantage: Released 2003 as Mac app launcher with extensibility and combinability features, remained in beta for ten years. Apple absorbed core functionality into Spotlight while competitors like Launch Bar, Alfred, and Raycast captured users, demonstrating innovation leadership doesn't guarantee market success.
Notable Moment
The hosts recorded forty-eight minutes of content before realizing they never pressed the record button, losing all discussion including detailed Quicksilver analysis. They suggest Riverside should alert users when conversations occur without recording active, similar to how smartwatches prompt about workouts.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to Change Log and Friends, the spooky edition. Big thanks to our friends over at fly.io. Getting our back, hosting our stuff, being the thing that makes our thing just that much better. Check them out at fly.io. Okay. Let's talk. Spokey. Well, friends, I don't know about you, but something bothers me about GitHub Actions. I love the fact that it's there. I love the fact that it's so ubiquitous. I love the fact that agents that do my coding for me believe that my CICD workflow begins with drafting TOML files for GitHub Actions. That's great. It's all great until, yes, until your builds start moving like molasses. GitHub actions is slow. It's just the way it is. That's how it works. I'm sorry. But I'm not sorry because our friends at name space, they fix that. Yes. We use name space dot so to do all of our builds so much faster. Namespace is like GitHub actions, but faster. I mean, like, way faster. It caches everything smartly. It caches your dependencies, your Docker layers, your build artifacts, so your CI can run super fast. You get shorter feedback loops, happier developers because we love our time, and you get fewer, I'll be back after this coffee and my build finishes. So that's that's not cool. The best part is it's drop in. It works right alongside your existing GitHub actions with almost zero config. It's a one line change. So you can speed up your builds, you can delight your team, and you can finally stop pretending that build time is focus time. It's not. Learn more. Go to namespace.so. That's namespace.so, just like it sounds, like it said. Go there. Check them out. We use them. We love them, and you should too. Namespace.so. So I got a confession to make. Okay. One time One time. When I was doing an interview for this show Okay. I went about twenty minutes into the show, and I realized that I did not hit the record button. Gosh. And it was a guest. The guy I just met that day, and we were grooving. Oh, man. We were having a blast, and then I stopped. And I said, I'm so sorry because I've done this. How many times have we done this? Just so many. So many. In fact, I think my personal episode count has broke the 1,000 mark at this point, and I think you're getting close to that. I wouldn't doubt it. Yes. And I said, I am so sorry. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna dox him. And I said, but I have not been recording this. Now I said, hopefully, you're recording a local of your own. And he said, I am. And I said, I'm recording a local of my own. And he said, okay. I think we're good then. And we stopped and made sure that he was recording and it was good, and you could hear him and …
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Books, tools, and gear mentioned in this episode
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Tools
by MDG
“Meteor JS Trajectory: Raised $31 million across seed and Series B rounds, built full-stack JavaScript framework with thousands of community packages, but parent company MDG pivoted to Apollo GraphQL in 2019.”
“SPONSORS: Notion”
“SPONSORS: Fly.io”
“They suggest Riverside should alert users when conversations occur without recording active, similar to how smartwatches prompt about workouts.”
by MDG
“parent company MDG pivoted to Apollo GraphQL in 2019, selling Meteor assets to Tiny Capital for maintenance mode rather than continued growth and innovation.”
“LibSass reached official end-of-life October 2024 after five years of deprecation.”
“SPONSORS: Namespace”
“Sass Preprocessor Evolution: LibSass reached official end-of-life October 2024 after five years of deprecation. Originally created to add variables and nesting to CSS, Sass successfully pushed features into native CSS itself.”
Products
by Google
“Google Reader (2005-2013), which not only died itself but effectively killed RSS as a mass-market technology, leaving only niche users with alternatives like Feed Bin and Feedly still using RSS feeds today.”
“Apple absorbed core functionality into Spotlight while competitors like Launch Bar, Alfred, and Raycast captured users.”
“Quicksilver's First-Mover Disadvantage: Released 2003 as Mac app launcher with extensibility and combinability features, remained in beta for ten years.”
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