From the man who brought us Wikipedia, comes Wikia: an open source search engine, backed by a reported $14 million dollars of venture funding.

Wikia, more or less, is attempting to wrangle the same forces that chiseled Wikiapedia into future world history books, and apply them to a for-profit search engine. A really unsexy way to describe Wikia's idea in reality is this:

Wikia will use a traditional search algorithms to produce a (primitive) "first draft" of any given search result. This first draft's rankings will be open to the public for re-ranking (and moderation). At first, the results will suck, but after the project reaches a critical mass, and has an active user base comparable to Wikipedia's -- guarding and improving the quality of results -- the search engine will blast off into the galaxy, leaving Google orbiting the moon.  

"Of all the monsters that fill the nightmares of our folklore, none terrify more than werewolves, because they transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest.

The familiar software project, at least as seen by the nontechnical manager, has something of this character; it is usually innocent and straightforward, but is capable of becoming a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and flawed products. So we hear desperate cries for a silver bullet--something to make software costs drop as rapidly as computer hardware costs do.

But, as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet."

- Fred Brooks, from No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering (circa 1987)

The Blame Game

Peter Van Dijck mentions that a mysterious man by the name of "Mike" asserts on some mailing list that he "can think of at least 5 startups that were seriously hurt by using Drupal”. That hit close to home: I work for a startup that is using drupal. Is my startup in danger of failing? Clearly, the answer is yes. To quote Captain Obvious,

"Launching a web startup is inherently dangerous business; the success rate is depressing at best. The odds are that you will fail -- and fail miserably at that. People may even laugh at your startup for years to come."

Is my startup in danger because we are using Drupal? The answer is no. Unless me and the other developers didn't know how to work with drupal (and we certainly do). On the otherhand, there are about 100 other factors that might lead to us failing, all of which keep me up at night:

1. The idea sucks to begin with
2. Failure to be objective with ourselves
3. Failure to build a critical mass after launch
4. Inability to capitalize on our users, even if we build critical mass
5. Setting unrealistic goals
6. Incompetence in any area of the business, be it development, leadership, talent, marketing, legal, or financial
7. Going broke
8. Failure to accurately predict the future
9. Getting crushed by an 800 pound gorilla
10. Breakdown in communication between developers, marketers, business types, and investors.
11. Failure to differentiate ourselves from competiting services
12. The product is unsexy, and unneeded to begin with.

These factors are unchanging no matter what technology you use. Would these unnamed startups that allegedly failed on account of drupal succeeded had only they used RoR, Java, Plone, Coldfusion, or build something home grown?