Thursday, July 28, 2005

[print version] Getting real about wikimania | CNET News.com

[print version] Getting real about wikimania | CNET News.com: "Is it easier to run a company on a limited investment than it was, say, when you started Excite?
Kraus: Oh yeah. It took $3 million to get Excite from concept to release, it took $100,000 to get JotSpot from concept to release.
Why is that?
Kraus: Three reasons. When we started Excite, we had to buy expensive Sun servers and disk arrays and all sorts of stuff. Hardware costs nothing these days. Second, you don't pay for compilers, app servers, Web servers--any of that anymore. You use Linux, you use Tomcat, you use Apache--I mean, the infrastructure software is free, essentially. And the third reason is that start-ups have access to offshore labor in a way that they didn't have in the early 1990s. IBM had access to offshore labor in the early 1990s but Excite as a start-up didn't."

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