A very wise developer I know, John Baldwin, (hey if you're reading this) once told me an important lesson: People don't pay for technology, they pay for a solution to a problem.
PyPy can't use introspection, like the standard logging framework (http://pypy.org/performance.html,) without severe performance penalties. Fix that and you've got a solution to a problem.
That quote doesn't quite hold water: the Vitamin industry is a multi-billion dollar one. Maybe it doesn't quite compare with Bayer, but it's still quite profitable.
Yes, I don't think you can take that quote too literally, or the intent is lost.
Figuratively, of course, it means people will pay handsomely and hurriedly for you to take their pain away, but it is difficult to get them to pay for potential small improvements.
I don't think that's true at all. The trouble is the aspirin is free. Node, jQuery, Python, pick-your-language-or-framework, almost all are free. The point of the article is that if you want to make a pain killer, it better be vicodin not aspirin. And even then, if it's a large enough problem, likely someone who can offer it for free will make slightly-less-good-but-free vicodin.
I think for infrastructure as a business to work you need to find a sweet spot of: 1.) a serious pain point 2.) for a large number of customers who do not have the resources to solve it themselves, and 3.) that is hard enough to solve that it can't be solved by a quickly hacked together product. In particular to 3, one example I can think of is a problem requiring a very complicated but powerful user interface.
Oh, and then you actually need to solve it, track down the customers and convince them to pay for it. Overall it's a tough needle to thread.
that problem is fixable within a week or developer time. I'm very skeptical i can actually find someone to even pay for that week. feel free to prove me wrong
You mean a version of PyPy that runs super fast as regular PyPy but that can also handle introspection? If it were that easy, why doesn't PyPy have that in place already? I think it's a lot harder than it sounds.
a version of pypy that handles enough introspection for logging to work, not e.g. dynamically modifying locals. it's not done because i have more important things to do in my free time essentially. as i said, if i can justify a week of paid time to do that, i would make logging fast.
I thought there were two fundamental ways to make a business: 1) You build a product/service and sell it. You sell the company for market share and revenues. I think everyone understands this.
2) The second way is more like a financial derivative, it's a bit more risky, a bit more complex, a bit more limited in terms of exit strategy, but you build a technology company and you sell the company for the technology itself and team that invented it. In this world, patents and actual IP matter more. It's a technology play, not a product play.
Apple and Google buy these companies, ARM, Qualcomm, Rambus are some examples of big ones.
I could see Hippy positioned 2 ways, 1) product, it's going to take 2 years to build (and that's probably really ugly to most of the hipster/cool kid VCs right now) it's going to be some kind of proprietary PHP VM that's 2x to 10x faster running unmodified code. It's going to cost $x per core or host or something. You're going to build it, you're going to market it and you're going to sell it. Maybe there will be a free community edition to help market it. I don't know, but that's the rough outline of the story. Hopefully PHP is still really popular in 2 years... Long lead time, product, then presumably you'll know how to market and sell it. Maybe my cold meds are fogging things, but that's kind of ugly but it seems almost palatable, these guys build compilers, without Pypy it's super ugly.
Alternatively you could position it like a technology company. This seems a lot more compelling, these guys have a great track record of doing great technology. They're doing legitimate cutting edge compiler stuff, routinely delivering it, routinely making improvements.. Tackling hard problems (like the GIL) and making headway. If you've got technology to make unchanged php 2x to 10x faster, you can't tell me there isn't a market for that, Facebook is building that for themselves. I'm sure Yahoo and others would be interested. There are existing php accelerators on the market. Plus, you're only funding the development team so it's a bit more inexpensive. What you need is like a VC backed by Facebook or Yahoo one of those interested parties already looking at this stuff or a VC with the right kinds of connections with other tooling companies that might be interested in buying this kind of technology. With their track record, it seems like a fairly safe technology play, they just need to find the right investors. Now asking them why Pypy doesn't accelerate certain types of code would be part of the process, perhaps understand their strategy to avoid that problem with PHP would come up.
PyPy can't use introspection, like the standard logging framework (http://pypy.org/performance.html,) without severe performance penalties. Fix that and you've got a solution to a problem.