jeffreymcmanus

They don't use the same CSS or the same content, although they do share design elements. So what. Lots of sites share design elements, because those design elements happen to work.

You need to revisit the definition of the word "cloning."

Demonstrably wrong. Developers (like anyone) are happy to pay for things if they can identify value. The problem is with the seller, not the buyer: people keep trying to sell things to developers that they can more easily build themselves. But today's platform as a service companies (like Twilio and others named in the piece) are providing a stack that can't easily be replicated by nerds working in isolation.

Do you cringe and blame your ISP every time you receive an email spam?

If you do the arithmetic, yes there will. At any rate, you don't need to be a millionaire to do venture investing.

Since it's possible to earn a degree online today, I'm not sure this is the case. Top-tier universities are faced with a significant innovator's dilemma problem here: they want to enforce their duopoly on the granting of degrees and they don't want online programs (which can deliver comparable content to students in a more scalable way at a fraction of the cost) to cut into their tuition revenue.

I'm not sure that beating the traditional university is the objective or that it's even necessary. Remember that the essence of a disruptive product is that it's a little bit worse and (at least) a little bit cheaper than the incumbent product. The question, then, for disruptive education plays (of which my company is one) is: which part of the traditional experience are you going to take away in order to achieve scale? Most .edu startups are taking away instructor interaction and emphasizing lectures, which is exactly the opposite of what most students actually need.

This kind of thing is one of the reasons why Georgia Tech is consistently among the top 10 computer science schools in the nation.

Uh, no. Did you even read the post?

Server has been migrated to WPEngine, which I am now deeply in love with.

This isn't about whatever language is the flavor of the month, although seeing universities teach a language that is less than 20 years old would be nice. It's more about CS programs that produce graduates who have no practical ability to code at all, in any language.

if the university purports to teach this stuff, they should hire people who actually know how to teach it. if their tenured PhDs aren't cutting it, they should look elsewhere. (this is how i got my university teaching job.)

Not instead of. In addition to.

No argument there. Like I say in the post, I'm all in favor of the goodness of the basics. I just think that giving undergrads all theory and very little practice is not optimal, and they should have the opportunity to go minimal on theory if it makes sense for them. Very few universities offer such a choice today.