I get the whole "slack welcoming Microsoft"[0] vibe from this post. Welcoming the competition in a tongue in cheek kind of way can be a clever marketing ploy sometimes although it's very rarely executed successfully. I think whatever you were trying to achieve with this went out the window when you released user activity information. The post is sprinkled with resentment which I don't think reflects the best on your business.
Competition, for the most part, is healthy. It validates that there is a market. Many successful businesses are created this way. The competition may/may not execute the idea better, but if they do then at least you know you have room for improvement. If they don't, well then that only strengthens your position as the front runner.
If it's a complete carbon copy, then it's usually survival of the fittest with who can obtain the most exposure. Don't get me wrong, I understand why you would be frustrated - it's never easy when a direct competitor pops up that can threaten the success of your business just as you're getting established (especially when you're emotionally and financially invested in it), but I think you're going to look back at this and realise exposing the competition this way really wasn't beneficial for you.
Regardless, keep your chin up. Don't let these types of things get you down - use it as a driving force to continue to improve and grow!
This looks nice! Can anyone recommend an opensource/self-hosted alternative? Would really like to set something like this up in the office but would prefer to host it on my internal network. Plus I like to tinker with things :)
"Smashing, the spiritual successor to Dashing, is a Sinatra based framework that lets you build excellent dashboards. It looks especially great on TVs."
dashing is a pretty stable product. Its like a simple framework you can customise anything you need in it. We used it in our team to serve alarm metrics till it was deprecated in favour of Grafana.
Grafana is a push model, while Dashing is a pull model.
Grafana is pretty tough on RAM and svg usage. Try to use pngs and the UI is harder to adopt.
Thanks, this looks like it'll suit my needs. I just wanted something I can pull a JSON feed into and have it display a handful of simple stats (sales for the day and their respective statuses, inventory overview - low stock alerts etc). The Grafana UI looks very attractive. Appreciate the suggestion.
Competition, for the most part, is healthy. It validates that there is a market. Many successful businesses are created this way. The competition may/may not execute the idea better, but if they do then at least you know you have room for improvement. If they don't, well then that only strengthens your position as the front runner.
If it's a complete carbon copy, then it's usually survival of the fittest with who can obtain the most exposure. Don't get me wrong, I understand why you would be frustrated - it's never easy when a direct competitor pops up that can threaten the success of your business just as you're getting established (especially when you're emotionally and financially invested in it), but I think you're going to look back at this and realise exposing the competition this way really wasn't beneficial for you.
Regardless, keep your chin up. Don't let these types of things get you down - use it as a driving force to continue to improve and grow!
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-slacks-full-page-ad-new-y...