He has a long history of fucking over business partners and customers, developing mediocre ball-of-mud software, writing terrible specifications and being the worst spec-maintainer of all time. Thankfully most of his technical efforts have been unsuccessful, despite the effect his self-aggrandizement had on the media for much of the last decade.
Unfortunately a few of his clusterfucks did slip out: XML-RPC, SOAP, and his epic mismanagement of RSS (which only ended with a headshot from Atom). The man singlehandedly set the web's progress back about a decade! If not for him, the nightmare of WS-* would not have existed -- the likes of Microsoft and IBM would have done something stupid in a big way, but they wouldn't have pretended it had anything to do with the web.
"In 2002 we had a bunch of people we fired and they were saying really untrue stuff about us in [Utah's] valley. It's a small valley.
We were just a $4M business - who cares about a $4M business - investors don't. We were saying 'you know we would never do it - you guys know us but you know it was he says, she says. But you know what, the day of reckoning must come. You just build the business. The credibility comes with the quality of business. Then they realize that the stuff you were saying was true...Revenue forgives all sins"
Josh James, founder of Omniture, sold to Adobe for $1.8B
What does this mean? This sentence especially is quite confusing:
"It works! As your competitors rise, eventually they have done to them what they did to you, and if you sit there a while, you don't have to do a thing -- nature takes care of it. "
Basically hope you're young when you get screwed over, if you're old the chances are you'll die before you get the karmic justice you desperately want . . . at least that's what the authors point seems to be.
Judging by this thread so far, it seems as if everyone's almost just as confused as I am by this article... :-(
What does the "river" represent? The flow of activity/competition/life? Why would you sit still and watch it all pass by you?
If A = the point where you and your competitor started in this "river" journey,
B = the point at which you got out of the river and sat by it, and
C = some distant point where your competitor is still "moving" with the river,
then you have a situation where A < B < C.
How an earth can your enemy pass you by? Unless there's a tide that makes the river flow in again at some point?
Sitting by the river means watching the time go by. Conveniently, the river also sometimes carries corpses. The proverb combines the two properties of the river to efficiently deliver its message.
What it means:
When your competitors who smeared your reputation get as big as you were, their own reputation will be smeared by another upstart, and you will have your revenge without lifting a finger.
Here's a pretty good introduction: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer... (read the comments)
He has a long history of fucking over business partners and customers, developing mediocre ball-of-mud software, writing terrible specifications and being the worst spec-maintainer of all time. Thankfully most of his technical efforts have been unsuccessful, despite the effect his self-aggrandizement had on the media for much of the last decade.
Unfortunately a few of his clusterfucks did slip out: XML-RPC, SOAP, and his epic mismanagement of RSS (which only ended with a headshot from Atom). The man singlehandedly set the web's progress back about a decade! If not for him, the nightmare of WS-* would not have existed -- the likes of Microsoft and IBM would have done something stupid in a big way, but they wouldn't have pretended it had anything to do with the web.