Charles Capps left the company, thus snagging development of the new product.
This isn't exactly what happened. Let me clear some things up, now that I feel comfortable doing so.
"UBB7" was killed
before I left Groupee, not after. It's death was the fault of a multitude of people, not just me. Except for Rick, he didn't do anything wrong.
The first failure was mine. Switching from bad Perl to adequate PHP (PHP4!) was a bad mistake. Since then, I've learned from additional experience to never attempt to make a major project in a new language as your first experience with that language. I had no real concept of how to build a proper
modern web application, and no idea how to work as anything other than a single cowboy coder.
The second failure was the vision given by management. Or rather, the lack of vision. Did you know we actually built two entirely functional prototypes?
The first was killed because it was an overengineered coding disaster. That was my fault, I didn't use the resources available to me to make it not suck. Also, yes, that's one of only a handful of screencaps that survived.
This is the other, gaze upon it and be in awe.
The second prototype was killed because the central (AWESOME!) focusing feature would have been unused by the majority of users. The thing you now know as Watch Lists is a close approximation of the feature, only not quite. Rick did the majority of the coding on that one, but the result was the same: the prototype was rejected because it would have been a failure in the marketplace.
And thus UBB7 died. I decided to leave Groupee. After I left, they reconsidered and commissioned UBB.threads 7.0.
