I was working on the Lightroom engineering team at the time and Adobe was heading towards killing the project in favor of a Bridge + Photoshop solution.
When Apple announced Aperture, it instantly galvanized the executive support in favor of Lightroom and Shantanu made the call for us to announce Lightroom and ship a public beta in 6 weeks.
Thankfully we ran the engineering team with an iterative and low technical debt threshold. We had been shipping iterations to a private beta group.
The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.
> The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.
Do you have any idea what happened? Aperture 1 was slow but it got better and since it was expensive to switch I never tried Lightroom until Apple cancelled Aperture. I was surprised to find that it was so much slower and eventually ended up getting a refund because even the Adobe support person eventually admitted that it wasn’t fair to suggest buying a new Mac just to be able to use the application.
I interviewed with DuckDuckGo a few months ago and their founders, investors, and board are not looking for the quick payout. They are more intent at a self sustaining alternative to Google.
I can imagine a company where everyone is excited by the perspective of being bought by a major corporation for a huge sum. You join the megacorp (which is not easy to get hired to), and your options suddenly are worth a lot. Win-win!
Oh my god!! I loved MacGolf!! I think that back in the day I used TMON to break the copy protection scheme (for personal use only, of course!) so many good memories. Thanks so much.
I agree with the blog posting: "One of the criticisms of machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches to the study of data is that both are “black box” technologies, which can provide useful automated answers but which do not provide human interpretable output, and for which it is often not possible to understand how they are doing what they are doing."
Ayasdi | Full-stack Engineer - App Platform | Menlo Park, CA | Full-time, ONSITE
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