Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

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Pastimes : The Death of Silicon Investor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (78)	11/15/2001 12:43:08 PM
From: (Bob) Zumbrunnen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1003

Curious as to how long you believe SI will survive under current conditions? Impossible to put that in any kind of chronological context. It'll survive for as long as INSP is willing to tolerate their inability to make money from it. I don't expect that to be very long. Especially since it's purely a "consumer business" and they're shying away from that kind of stuff. Or at least have said so. It could continue forever once costs are pared to a level that's acceptable to them, or the URL could become unresponsive tomorrow. Also, do you know of any alternatives to SI which offer similar high quality thinkers/posters of SI? No, because most of them are still on SI and won't leave until they're evicted or until a large enough number of them start moving elsewhere. The best of the alternatives that I'm aware of is iHub, though there's plus and minus there. The minuses involve its ability to continue operating, and especially its ability to survive any serious increase in traffic. Many a business has failed by not being ready for a deluge when a deluge hits. It would seem counter-intuitive to most people, except, I suspect, most people here, but "too much" business can be just as ruinous as "too little". Matt may or may not have a gray enough beard yet to realize that has less to do with technical/hardware matters than it does many other issues. Matt is somewhat of a prodigy (IMO) and does learn the hard lessons well. Eventually. <g> But he's having to wing it and learn as he goes, and that's extremely risky. As is operating on a shoestring when you're trying to go toe-to-toe against the likes of RB and SI. iHub is the one I most hope will emerge as "the next SI", but it's not a bet I'd take yet. If I started aggressively developing Talkzilla, I still wouldn't realistically consider it a reliable and viable alternative/replacement for several months. To answer your question another way, many of the high-quality people are still on SI. Wherever they are is where "the spirit of SI" is. As you can probably tell, I don't bear a grudge against iHub. I'm a bit disappointed about "what could've been", but not bitter about it. The fact that many of the issues that caused the rift are now going the direction I was struggling to make them go does make me feel better about them as a site.