People who use AMT for earning money may not necessarily be the right audience you are looking for.

The biggest determinant of success that I've seen is the skill of the programmers on the team.

No McMethodology can make crappy programmers write good code. Period.

(However, really bad management can make good programmers write crappy code too...)

As a developer myself, I love hearing:

> Implementing this should not be to hard...

Our startup is ChallengePost.com. Challenge.gov is the second site to use our platform.

I think people are too afraid of competition. There is no product without a lot of competition, and suprising as it seems, second best, 3rd best and so on are still making a hella lot of money.

Take microsoft word - it dominates the word processing market. But there are many people earning a lot of money selling OTHER word processors.

Competition is irrelevant, and in his particular case, he has a huge advantage over Nike. He has one product that he is working on, while Nike has a lot of other things to think about, and this is not important. He can add features immediately with no approval process. He can do anything he wants without paying attention to the damage it may have on other parts of the company.

This dude is at a clear advantage over Nike, so very frankly, I don't really think there is a problem.

They're forgetting it because they want to forget it.

Businessmen want (for reasons that are somewhat rational) to commoditize everything, including labor. Programming labor has been stubbornly difficult to commoditize. Programmers differ in skill in very deep and complex ways, and can't just be swapped out like assembly line workers.

This is immensely frustrating to the bean counters. Anything that comes along and promises to allow programmers to become commodities is going to catch on like wildfire. The desire is too strong from a management perspective. It doesn't matter how many times such efforts have failed in the past. What's old will become new again.

Eric S. Raymond accurately characterized Agile when he described it as repackaging the things hackers do anyway, in a way that can be sold to non-hackers.

Maybe you don't want to be sold a product. You're not the target audience for Agile Methodology(tm). The MBA and Tim Robbins crowd are.

I'd caution making your survey "Hey would you use Web app A?" The Mechanical Turk users want to blaze through the survey as fast as possible and get paid. Clicking "Yes" gets them through the fastest and also lets them please the surveyor (the same bias as your friends or family).

Force them to make a choice. Present Web app A (real), Web app B (dummy), and Web app C (dummy). Make them rank which web app is best.

Set up the survey three ways: A, B, C. B, C, A. and C, B, A. Have a third of the sample take each survey. You would be surprised at the first choice bias with Mechanical Turk. Actually you wouldn't be surprised when you remember that these people just want to get the thing done.

Finally a good secondary survey is to make them rank order features for their worth. This helps find your MVP. (Read more about "conjoint analysis" if this interests you.)

Digg isn't a startup. It started in 2004 and has been mature for about 5 years. They are a business now. And a big one at that.

Exactly. It reeks of buzzwords and consultant speak. Every brush I've had with an agile evangelist felt like a scene from "The Office".

Tough talk like that will win you cheap points, but you're just wasting peoples' time by taking a rushed and uninformed barf in the comment box. Let's examine your basic claim that: "[excluding the blatant propaganda, the projects] are just feel-good projects of no consequence". Here are some challenges featured on the front page:

* An X prize for green cars with a prize pool of $10,000,000. Run by Progressive Insurance and the X Prize Foundation.

* An X prize for green aerospace with a prize pool of $16,500,000. Run by NASA and the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency Foundation.

It took me about 5 minutes to verify that you just cherry picked from the data to support your preconceived notions. I have absolutely no idea how you could have thought you were adding to the conversation.

What a great post.

Software is used by people who want to solve a problem. Big, big companies can bring connections, brand recognition, money and other intimidating resources, sure.

In the end, though, people use the software, not the brand. No amount of money can replace the value of genuinely understanding and serving the needs of the people who use what you make.

In a software matchup between guys who live and die by their ability to make and sell software vs. guys who sell rubber and plastic sewn together in sweatshops, you can call the winner before you even see the fight. My hat is off to Jason for understanding the value of his company's position.

Stick a price tag on it.

[Edit: I wanted to leave that line alone for impact, but it might be read as overly abrupt or insulting. That isn't my intention.

I've always had free competitors. They were at the top of the three search terms I most wanted when I started, though I have since learned that I was mistaken about that. One thing I've learned over the years is that I am fairly well informed about the top twenty alternatives to my software and my customers are not. Relatedly, I was very sensitive to the notion of paying $25 for software and my customers were not. And I could put up with a little frustration and ease-of-use niggles to get a deal and my customers viscerally hate that.

P.S. I can't decide which is worse, selling to price-sensitive customers or playing price-chicken with someone whose product is free.]

Like Joel Spolsky said it: "They followed the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite everything from scratch" - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I think rewriting from scratch is the core of their problem and not really Cassandra. Gradually going over to Cassandra would have been a much better idea.

It's not clear from the article what kind of business model the Startup in question is planning to use. This is relevant, as the fact the 73% of random strangers said they would "use the service as described" doesn't give any indication that they'd be willing to pay for it.

Clearly, the author got his $27.50 worth; how much that's really worth, though, in the long term, remains to be seen.