Simon Wardley has continued to evolve and refine the insights that led him to conceiving Zimki, and it is well worth any tech entrepreneur's time to take a look at the current iteration of "Wardley Mapping" to better understand how technologies (and platforms) evolve:<p><a href="https://learnwardleymapping.com/book/" rel="nofollow">https://learnwardleymapping.com/book/</a><p>If Blank and Ries transformed our understanding of startup <i>tactics</i>, Wardley is improving our understanding of <i>strategy</i>.<p>Simon's account of the Zimki episode is in Chapter 5, if you just want a bit more detail: <a href="https://medium.com/wardleymaps/the-play-and-a-decision-to-act-8eb796b1dff1" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/wardleymaps/the-play-and-a-decision-to-ac...</a>
Zimki was SO far ahead of its time - it was at least five years too early. Server-side JavaScript, Heroku-style PaaS, with its own object storage - back in 2006.<p>I was at the 2007 OSCON where Simon Wardley resigned on-stage after Canon changed their mind on open sourcing it. That was quite a moment!
I interviewed with them (I knew a few people there) and had an interesting half-hour discussion with Mr Wardley about the implications of wide-spread availability of 3D printers (he had a 3D printed model of an XBOX controller) - little did we know it would be nearly another decade before they were becoming widely available.<p>[edit: also one of the best technical interviews I had. They sat me down with a Mac and a list of stuff to do and left me alone for, I think, an hour to work through them as best I could. No restrictions on looking stuff up, no gotcha questions, no algorithm implementations, etc.]
Heroku and Zimki are fundamentally different. We quickly evolved into a Polyglot product, with wonderful primitives and invented a nice interface for extension, namely buildpacks and our add-OBS market.<p>There were lots of examples of companies doing things Zimki did, most WebObjects projects felt that way IMO.
> " One of the very first PaaS offerings in history actually belonged to Canon ... until it was abruptly killed by Canon itself"<p>There are dozens of examples of people being first to market and not winning (Canon). As so, what's so interesting about this article?<p>- Facebook won, when MySpace and others were first to market<p>- Google won, and it was crazy late to market over Yahoo/Altavista/Excite.<p>- Starbucks won, when plenty of other national coffee chains existed<p>etc