First, many thanks to Todd for creating this amazing board and all the participants for making an amazing community. Hope you all had a good 2021 given our current world circumstances and better things ahead in 2022.
I had the good fortune of joining back in 2010 as a complete wine neophyte and thus without any involvement or knowledge at all of the brouhaha that went on over at the Robert Parker board, only learning about it secondhand from posts here as well as speaking to board members in person who were around to live through that experience. However, it’s not foreign to me as I’ve experienced it in other business and pleasure pursuits. It’s quite common, unfortunately, for people to start envisioning themselves as kings of their own little kingdoms. When that happens, they show what kind of leaders and people they actually are. This is also the type of person who seeks to eliminate anyone who poses a potential threat to their position and they’ll do anything to hold on to their “spot.” They are essentially trying to eliminate any competition but ironically always end up creating it. This is because they envision “victory” as the person leaving the kingdom and thus no longer posing a threat and they don’t realize that those who leave either join other “realms” or as Todd did simply establish another one.
The fight to hold on to their “spot” and maintain control of the kingdom involves so much time and resources, however, that innovation falls to the wayside and the kingdom eventually dies out. All it takes is one wrong move to end things. What finally decimated the other e-board was the attempt to charge the board members via forced subscription. When you do that, you are no longer supporting a hobby or a community. You are running a business and if you are going to charge money, you better be providing a product or service people are willing to pay for that nobody else is providing.
I have no dog in the fight and no ill will towards this Squires fellow or Robert Parker or anyone that preceded my time on the previous board. I wasn’t privy to it and don’t need to be. The very fact that it no longer exists and WB is still running successfully a decade on from its founding is evidence in and of itself of who did things right and who did things wrong. As we say in law, “Res Ipsa Loquitor,” i.e. the very thing speaks for itself.
WB has made a positive difference to a lot of people’s lives, including my own, so thank you Todd for having the courage and tenacity to set it up all those years ago. There are other forums but WB is in a class of its own.
I don’t believe that the Squires BB was ever seen by MS and RMP as a business, or even as part of the TWA package, rather as a necessary evil which eventually was judged to be no longer necessary. I suspect that they made a huge misjudgement, but MS was adamant at the time that there was no significant impact on subscriptions, neither when the paywall went up, nor when it closed for good. We shall probably never know the truth, but it would be interesting to find out if there was indeed no impact.
What is certainly true is that the muzzling and eventual demise of the BB contributed to the siege mentality that began with the paywall and has dominated TWA ever since. Hopefully the new team will change all that.
Some of us are old enough to remember not only Blackberries, but Word Perfect and even its predecessor Micropro WordStar. Not to mention Lotus 1-2-3, and film cameras.
with Amipro and Lotus Symphony mixed in. I even had Microsoft chart installed on one of the two office desktops, so I could produce graphics for board members on our colour plotter (what you see in Excel originated in chart). Those were the days
My partner always trumps me on this, by recounting her days coding where the executable code was ‘printed’ onto punch card to be run overnight. It did encourage greater accuracy than in modern coders!
I think the beginning of the end was well before they pulled the plug on non-subscribers. I joined Ebob either in late-07 or early-08 and there was a clear tension that existed at that time. Ebob was a sick man at that point and while in the initial moment I couldn’t see any other forum replacing Ebob’s relevance, in reality it was just a matter of time.
I certainly don’t see or feel that tension here having been on this forum for over 12 years. What separates here from Ebob is that the forum doesn’t rough up younger or newer drinkers the way it used to or the way Ebob would. There is much more of an open door and people itb here aren’t looked at or treated with near disdain. This forum will eventually go away, but I don’t think it’s any time soon and as long as the vibe stays the way it is, this won’t be looked at the way Ebob is.
Although I’ve been kidding around about superceded technologies, I don’t think the migration from eBob to WB was really analogous. It wasn’t really a market leader being surpassed by an upstart. The format and technology and participants were pretty much the same at the time of The Great Migration.
It really came down to an incompatibility of interests. Their board was an adjunct to a subscription product – a cost center without any very clear payoff – so they didn’t the hassle. And, partly, Parker was too thin-skinned and Squires too officious. And Parker was still powerful, so the board naturally drew his supporters and critics.
In the end, the for-profit business model and the personalities at eBob didn’t suit the needs of the users. The non-profit structure here, without sacred cows or moderators at war with the community, has (mostly) brought out the best in people.
Small potatoes, John. Until you can brag that you used your punched cards on a vacuum tube computer (IBM 650), you’re an also-ran!! I also used my iPhone to connect remotely to the 650!!
Tom
