I worked on Pipes briefly, shortly after it launched. It was really two distinct products rolled into one. The visual interface was groundbreaking and stunning-I think half my team was hired on the strength of that demo. No one could believe Javascript could do that.
The backend was an extremely useful tool for munging RSS feeds. With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful. It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise.
Hats off to psadri and the other Pipes creators for a really stellar piece of work.
By the way: many people in the past, including here on HN says that Elop was right, and that the reason Nokia died was 100% apple+google fault.
Here in Brazil Elop effect was interesting: it was VERY obvious, yet noone here knows who the hell Elop is.
To put it simple: When Elop released that stupid memo, Nokia had 67% of Brazil smartphone market share, and the share was still rising, and Nokia utterly dominated in the non-smartphone market too. Right after Elop memo, the first thing that happened is that suddenly the communities died (although Nokia store DID suck, there was at least in Brazil a vibrant freeware app community that shared stuff in forums), then just some months later you could not find phones for sale, even new models, because the import companies DID heard of Elop memo, and decided to not risk importing the phones, even if shopkeepers still wanted it.
The end result was funny: Elop nuking of Symbian was so hard, that in Brazil other smartphones could not keep up for a while, and we temporarily had a decrease in smartphone use, and a increase in feature phone use, and that increase came mostly from truly crap chinese companies, because not even Nokia feature phones could be found in stores anymore.
> Elop was a director of consulting for Lotus Development Corporation before becoming CIO for Boston Chicken in 1992,[3][7] which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998
> In the same year, he joined Macromedia's Web/IT department[7] [...] from January 2005[10] for three months before their acquisition by Adobe Systems
> He was then president of worldwide field operations at Adobe, tendering his resignation in June 2006 and leaving in December,[12] after which he was the COO of Juniper Networks for exactly one year from January 2007 – 2008
This is not the CV of a man that I would hire for anything other than running a going concern into the ground.
Ahh, what a terrible CEO. When the only two possibilities to explain your tenure are 1) a lying co-conspirator or 2) mind-blowingly incompetent--then you've truly done a bang-up job.
I'm still upset by the fact that MeeGo/Maemo was killed, and Nokia sold to Microsoft. The N9 was still the best phone I've ever used, and it's UX ideas are still the simplest and most effective way of using a phone, and yet no one else has implemented it.
Jolla (https://jolla.com) was founded by people involved in MeeGo development. While their phone got a lukewarm response, I've heard many good things about their upcoming tablet and have ordered one. As you used MeeGo, how does Sailfish OS appear to compare with it?
Sailfish unfortunately does not have all of the UI things I'm talking about -- the "three screen with edge gestures", which is a shame :( They couldn't, because the N9's UI was never open sourced despite the core being so.
Is Nokia's example really good ? Nokia remain one of the largest companies in telecom hardware provider and handsets was always a side business for them. They successfully sold it to microsoft.
i think nokia is more about lack of executive vision/market knowledge. The other examples are more about middle management, besides the executive lack of vision and bean counting.
Incorrect. The first rule of mismanagement club is to never know exactly how you got into mismanagement club; but by god you are going to do a bang up job of it now you are in!
I think most/many people could reasonably say this about their company; I currently work at Google and feel quite the same. I'm not convinced that either Google or Twitter[1] qualify as a particularly spectacular example of mismanagement though.
[1] I don't have first-hand experience but one of my best friends work there and we regularly vent to each other about work complaints.
I'll echo those sentiments, the UI for that time certainly had a wow factor.
> With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful.
Look at IFTTT services now and it's easy to realize that pipes even in its original incarnation could have been so much more given its brain dead UI ease.
It's a shame that Yahoo is shutting this down rather than pivoting it as an IFTTT or similar. I'd wager that it's lack of ownership that makes it hard to pivot. I also don't recall it having a premium tier which has got to weigh down the resources--talent always gravitates toward revenue centers it seems.
> talent always gravitates toward revenue centers it seems.
Ie the 'new management can't fire my entire division for being unprofitable' center. Seems like a smart move for the people who wrote Pipes but never found a business model for it.
I wrote a simple Wordpress plugin that works with RSS feeds. In addition to aggregating fees, Pipes has been a go-to solution when people report feeds that are malformed, have some weird characters or anything that chokes the Wordpress RSS parser (simplepie). People would run them through pipes, which seemed to handle anything and output clean RSS.
I'm sad to see it go and it'll be missed by quite a few people who use my plugin.
The backend was an extremely useful tool for munging RSS feeds. With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful. It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise.
Hats off to psadri and the other Pipes creators for a really stellar piece of work.