The Connected Company by Dave Gray & Thomas Vander Wal

Author:Dave Gray & Thomas Vander Wal [Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Strategic Planning
ISBN: 9781449336646
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 2012-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

You don’t have to be Big

You don’t have to be a big company to create a powerful platform. You just have to create something that’s valuable and supports people in their work.

37signals is a small software company with fewer than 30 full-time employees. In 2003, David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals was working on the company’s core software product, Basecamp, a web-based project-management application. He was writing code in a language called Ruby, first created in Japan in the early 1990s. As he worked, Heinemeier Hansson developed a series of libraries and frameworks that made it easier for him to do the work. At some point about halfway through the project, he realized that the tools he had created constituted a work environment that made it much easier to program web applications. So he decided to share it with other developers.

He open-sourced the framework and called it Ruby on Rails. Rails was an immediate hit with programmers, because it allowed them to do more work more elegantly and efficiently than they could in any other language.

The developer community that rallied around Rails helped build out and improve the framework, adding new functionality, fixing bugs, adding patches, and so on. By sharing the Rails platform with a developer community, 37signals was able to recruit an army of developers that collectively extended and strengthened it in ways that the company never could have done by itself. And giving the code away cost them nothing. Says Heinemeier Hansson:

I’m going to be no poorer because I shared this open source software that I developed anyway. I needed it already. So if I give it away after it’s already done, what am I losing? Exactly nothing. I’m gaining a ton of stuff though. I’m putting this into a wonderful, beautiful commons and everybody else is doing the same thing and all the actors walk away from that richer.

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