Patrick wrote "year in review" posts going back to 2006, and they include full numbers, so you can see for yourself. Profit margins in 2014 (the most recent review) were at a whopping 60% across all his businesses. (See here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/12/22/kalzumeus-software-year-...)
Not really. Moving past patio11 as an example, just look at local businesses in your community. The ones that have been there the longest (> 50 years) have undoubtedly gone through periods of both growth and decline (I don't mean decline toward death, I mean decline for a bit and then start growing again). Many of the ones that have been there for about 20 years will have reached a sort of "asymptote" of growth--they would have grown for the first 10 or 15 years and then stabilized around a size that feels "comfortable". There are many more businesses in the world than just start-ups and public companies.
Software built by 1 person will always have good margins. According to his numbers, BCC was making $60k in good years. 60% of that is $36k, which is a fraction of what a solid Dev can make (and an even smaller fraction of what he patio11 was making consulting). Clever side project income for sure, but not a staggering work of business genius.
Sure, and I suppose "barely profitable" could be interpreted as "producing a small amount of absolute profit", but I read it as "barely producing more revenue than expenses", which is obviously incorrect in this case.
But be careful about how much you trust any bitcoin service. Bitcoinica, another margin trading platform, was wildly popular but existed for only 6 months; they had to shut down after several hacks and people lost funds.
Also, the main way to get non-bitcoin funds into these kinds of services is via mtgox redeemable codes, but those won't be available anymore after the 10th of April because of legal concerns.
He didn't find the language (ruby) unsuitable, but rather the framework (rails) too heavy. This might of been exactly the same if he tried PHP with Zend/Symphony/etc.
His bottom line should of been: "Sometimes its better to work without a framework".
there is no catch. their business model is not on repo count, but collaborators count. in other words, solo devs and very small teams can freeride, if you grow bigger you start paying.
BitBucket is run by Atlassian, their goal is to later upsell you to their line of products, so they loss lead with free unlimited private repos in the hope that if you need a project management/bugtracker system you might choose JIRA.
Most of my (ex israeli military) and extremely talented people didn't even look at web startups but went to work for companies "doing real products" where "there are complex challenged".
They view 99% of web startups as glorified TODO apps with the biggest challenge being playing around doing A/B on front page headlines. Hardly an engineering challenge.
They want to build stuff like Terabite-size de-duplicated storage infrastructure, or embedded devices.
And they are the majority of the brilliant people I know who all started as "programmers" (java/c/c#/etc)
Pretty much every modern websockets Javascript library you use these days will provide fallback mechanisms to flash or long polling to provide the same features. Take a look at the supported browsers for Socket.io and its a much larger list then the one you've provided.
Growth or death is true for most businesses, just need to decide on the growth acceleration