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The other question is: how do you stack up against competitors? We know Microcosm is streets ahead of old forum technology, but how does it compare to new tech springing up now? How do you stack up against Discourse? Any others you keep an eye on?
The 'limp along until organic growth revives it' plan risks being left behind by startups with money to spend.
Yeah, I'm concerned about that... that the zombie will age quickly relative to other funded products.
The biggest advantage Microcosm has is the centralisation and that we started with an API.
The shift to mobile is a key part of the opportunity window we saw, and we felt that unlike phpBB, vBulletin, and even Discourse - all of which are things you install on your own server - we would focus on being a centralised platform.
What that allows is for native mobile clients to be made that give a phenomenal experience that no-one else could offer. Well... Google Groups could, or Yahoo Groups... but rather insanely neither even has an API and both seem to be largely neglected.
So you see in our mobile design the hints of what a mobile app would look like. And that is our core advantage over everyone else.
Looking more specifically at Discourse, we've taken an old-web approach (single web pages served from the server) and they've taken a new-web approach (big JavaScript application). This was a conscious choice on our part... forums have always been dark silos of information that Google couldn't reach, and thus the forums didn't really get to grow by discovery (from new users). We chose to build this rich API, and have a fairly primitive front-end so that Google would index us deeply and we'd help those forums grow as a result.
Discourse would likely argue that the newer single page application gives them the ability to be embedded on other things, integrated, and feeling fresh and modern. They'd be right on that... our disadvantage was always that integrating a larger multi-page platform into something else is harder than dropping a JavaScript widget on a page.
Discourse was made for devs, we made Microcosm for non-devs.
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Velocio
@moth
The other question is: how do you stack up against competitors? We know Microcosm is streets ahead of old forum technology, but how does it compare to new tech springing up now? How do you stack up against Discourse? Any others you keep an eye on?
The 'limp along until organic growth revives it' plan risks being left behind by startups with money to spend.