Douglas: The first time I saw JavaScript when it was first announced in 1995, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. And partly why I thought that was because they were lying about what it was.
A bigger more interesting thing though is how his company failed, in part, because they used handrolled JSON for messaging.
Douglas: And some of our customers were confused and said, “Well, where’s the enormous tool stack that you need in order to manage all of that?”
“There isn’t one, because it’s not necessary”, and they just could not understand that. They assumed there wasn’t one because we hadn’t gotten around to riding it. They couldn’t accept that it wasn’t necessary.
Adam: It’s like you had an electric car and they were like, “Well, where do we put the gas in?”
Douglas: It was very much like that, very much like that. There were some people who said, “Oh, we just committed to XML, sorry, we can’t do anything that isn’t XML.”
