I intended that as a reference to an XKCD strip[0]. Folks often talk about public goods like scientific research, as if the "real stuff" couldn't possibly happen without private investment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Barstool is referenced more than once in the piece, but not directly by name. Deadspin did not fail, it was murdered.
And I know you aren't saying it directly, but this really shouldn't be about The Left and The Right. The problem is about punching up versus punching down.
A crawler has two high level options: parse the page, or render the page.
Most of our parser-based crawling is done by Heritrix (crawler.archive.org) and most of our render-based crawling is done by a proxy-based recorder similar to what you theorize (https://github.com/internetarchive/brozzler).
A five minute outage of the point-of-sale system during the lunch rush can easily cost even the smallest of restaurants several hundred dollars.
True, most websites do not have this problem, because most websites do not drive revenue like that. There are plenty of use cases where you need five nines, but only within limited not-24/7 time windows.
Overall crime rate in the US (everywhere?) has decreased since the 1970s or so. There is speculation it had to do with lead paint.
There has not been a single "mass shooting" in Australia since the gun ban. In the US, mass shootings decreased after the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, and then increased after it expired 2004.
I mean, you can call the APIs locked down if you insist, but SaaS is SaaS. Would you count S3 as a locked down API, for example? OpenStack's Swift (and plenty of other products) will emulate it. I chose the term "interoperable" specifically instead of "API compatible" but I agree this gets very confusing when talking about SaaS.
In order to do what Slack is doing, they have to be somewhat committed to open standards. They are just doing webhooks, like GitHub does. We tried specifying microformats, and we tried specifying webhooks, but the "loose RPC" model... Seems to work way better than XMPP server interoperability ever has.
Indeed, Federation was only a part of their Enterprise offering. :rimshot: It is only Slack-to-Slack, so it is not interoperable in that way. Shared channels are a thing now too, and danged if I can keep up with all the new bells and whistles.
Slack is very much an organizational groupware product, with chat done well. Not the utopia federated XMPP promises, but frankly, XML just needs to die. (Which, not coincidentally, is part of what attracted me to work on the telehash specification.)
Seems like Slack figured out how to make a lot of money out of interoperable groupware. If they'd been slower at it, I'd still be saying they're an acquisition target for those companies.
edit: "All" they did was come along at the right time and make the interoperability easy. The prerequisites to have done it at all? Smartphones, WebRTC, and ElasticSearch.