Comments on: Pay for your own dog food

By: tim

tim — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:47:23 +0000

I have yet to see any studies that shows that “eating ones own dog food” actually improves a product outside of anecdotal evidence.
At one of the software companies I used to work for – I was told that I must use a product that incorporated our technology as the basis for the corporate website. The problem is we were a small 200 person shop whereas the product was designed for huge sites (e.g. CNN) so it took a costly effort to build the site and was complicated to change the content. This didn’t help my sanity nor help to improve the product.
Microsoft is not really a good example of this approach. Microsofts systems are not indicative to any other company so Microsofts engineers don’t get the full experience. Case in point – Microsoft approach to logging. Its a pain and doesn’t sync with any other companies product’s approach to logging. I am dealing with that issue at this very moment.
I also don’t see Microsofts products more or less buggy then competitors. Case in point – Windows 7 just blue screened on me an hour ago.

By: Iang (issuing and using own money)

Iang (issuing and using own money) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:27:20 +0000

When I was in the digital cash business we always used the product to pay for as much as we could of everything. We got the same effect, vigorous analysis of the benefits and difficulties of the pricing. It also led to several alternate ventures started in competition, some even started by the people who’s pricing structure would be undercut.
The other thing we did was always to use real money for software test purposes (as well as toy money, both). This ensured that the results of tests were indicative in the real world, as toy money had a way of spilling on the floor and nobody cared. When the developer had to show the results with their salary, the attention was much higher to all aspects of the financial experience.

By: David Brodbeck

David Brodbeck — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:51:49 +0000

I always thought “self-hosting” had a more specific meaning — that a piece of software was built under, or using, a version of itself.