And he almost did it again - if he "exited" at the peak of Color.

When was Color's peak exactly? When they raised money? Because after that, it was mostly failures after failures.

And before that, too. I'm still struggling to see what, if anything, Color did to enhance anybody's life.

Oh, I don't know. I recall a good half an hour of gleeful Schadenfreude in the office when we all tried out Color for the first (and last) time.

I'm not saying that a fleeting moment of entertainment in the lives of a few jaded technology folk was a good return on that investment, mind!

I wholeheartedly agree with him - I wish I had read this essay in 2001, I wish every Java developer, especially whose who were live in US, had read it. There was nothing wrong of Java in 2001, but, you should have caught the smell of corporate, protocol, committee, process, outsourcing, offshoring ...

Looks very nice. Pretty pricy too. It seems for team <=20, always $5000 per year, I wonder why they are not making the pricing more flexible.

Because they'd rather have you using the hosted platform instead of having to support enterprise customers. There's a very steep support side when you sell something as "enterprise."

They do have licensing options for purchases of 1000+ seats.

I do agree that its quite expensive however, this is why the company I work for chose Gitorious instead of GH:E with 300+ seats.

We've used gitorious as well, but due to several problems we've now switched to a GitHub organization and Gitlab. Much more happy this way in general, but the team management options for GitHub are lacking. Purely going for the Gitlab route would've probably worked out better. (We have around 50 people with Github accounts now and some of them are changing teams frequently.)

a side note - after such experiment, if any worker comes back and say he feels more productive at office than at home, write down his name and pay attention to his work: he is either a pretentious corporate ladder climber trying to impress his boss, or if he is a developer or engineer, with great work ethic.

"But there's no reason a good developer can't be a good manager"

This is very wrong. They required very different skills and personality. Promoting a good developer to management role may hurt the developer himself and eventually destroyed the project/team. My personal experience though.

My fellow readers, this article is definitely not cynicism or sarcasm, it has some very good suggestions for the "IT" people in corporate of America, especially Fortune 100.

If you think or use the word "hack" in your job, then it is not for you - and that is a good thing, isn't.

http://jelastic.com/team? Is this a Russian company?

We are something of an international company. We have offices in the US and Ukraine. Our funding comes from Runa Capital, which is Russian. I am based in Houston, TX. :)

Thanks for answering my question - I'd suggest you to put more information on jelastic.com, for example, for US customers, do you have your fully owned data center in US? or you are building on top of other providers (AWS, Rackspace, Linode etc etc)? if so, how is the quality of service and support of your provider? Where is your engineer located? You might also want to consider to provide a 800 phone number. As far as software stack is concerned, I suggest you to add messaging support for example ActiveMq or RabbitMq - it is essential for "big" systems, which are more likely be your source of revenue.

To your first question: we actually don't own datacenters. We partner with reputable hosters within each country that we go into so that there is already a well known and established company with great infrastructure in place. So, for example, if you US Jelastic in the US, your actual data would be on the Jelastic platform with Servint (our US partner). All of our partners have incredible uptime (Servint has something like 7 9's after their 99.9% uptime) and service.

As far as engineers and such, we are on both sides of the globe, US and Eastern EU, so that we can cover all times zones well.

Not sure about adding a support phone number. I've always had bad experiences when providing that as another option for support, especially in today's hyper connect world. We find that most our users (>12k) prefer the forums, support tickets and Twitter and Facebook.

I do like your idea for a messaging system. I've actually been considering Olarq. I'll most definitely make sure that we talk about this. :)

Thanks for the suggestions!

I first heard this website from business week a while ago - guess that was when most of the world began to notice it. I would not have been impressed from a tech-crunch article....hmmm...another photo sharing site targeted at a niche market/audience (craft community)

How smart they are! Same photo sharing plus "like", "follow", but they definitely focused on the right community and audience - a group of people who really love they are doing and are passionate of their work, and willing to share with people alike.

And even better, it appears most of the images are actually "pinned" from other web sites (which store and serve the images?), so they are building their pin-board business on top of the whole internet. (how are they spending those millions of dollars?)