Cofounder and former CEO of EtherPad here. I appreciate your kind words about our product. Allow me to clarify some aspects of the story.

First, we knew etherpad was more than a toy. We knew people were using it for real work. We had paying customers and thousands of dollars a month in revenue. (Not a lot of revenue, but decent evidence that etherpad was more than a toy).

Second, the relationship between etherpad and appjet is much different from how you characterize it. AppJet was a failing idea. We had like no users. We had spent over a year building this developer platform and we had practically zero developers actually using it. It clearly wasn't working. We were ecstatic when etherpad took off. After etherpad took off, we shut down appjet.com and focused our entire company on etherpad. appjet.com redirected to etherpad.com. It felt great to have a product that people were actually using!

Third, we never thought the Wave product was better than the etherpad product. However, the Wave vision was pretty awesome. Lars' narrative excited a lot of people when he delivered the announcement at Google IO '09. When we met with him, we were dazzled by his vision and the team's optimism. Perhaps we were naive.

The decision to sell to Google was one of the toughest decisions I and my cofounders ever had to wrestle with in our lives. We were excited by the Wave vision though we saw the flaws in the product. The Wave team told us about how they wanted our help making wave simpler and more like etherpad, and we thought we could help with that, though in the end we were unsuccessful at making wave simpler. We were scared of Google as a competitor: they had more engineers and more money behind this project, yet they were running it much more like an independent startup than a normal big-company department. The Wave office was in Australia and had almost total autonomy. And finally, after 1.5 years of being on the brink of failure with AppJet, it was tempting to be able to declare our endeavor a success and provide a decent return to all our investors who had risked their money on us.

In the end, our decision to join Wave did not work out as we had hoped. The biggest lessons learned were that having more engineers and money behind a project can actually be more harmful than helpful, so we were wrong to be scared of Wave as a competitor for this reason. It seems obvious in hindsight, but at the time it wasn't. Second, I totally underestimated how hard it would be to iterate on the Wave codebase. I was used to rewriting major portions of software in a single all-nighter. Because of the software development process Wave was using, it was practically impossible to iterate on the product. I should have done more diligence on their specific software engineering processes, but instead I assumed because they seemed to be operating like a startup, that they would be able to iterate like a startup. A lot of the product problems were known to the whole Wave team, but we were crippled by a large complex codebase built on poor technical choices and a cumbersome engineering process that prevented fast iteration.

I'm grateful for the many lessons learned through the whole experience. And I'm hopeful that the same software engineering and product skills that produced etherpad, combined with the many valuable lessons learned through the Google acquisition, will be able to produce even better products in the future. My cofounder David Greenspan and I have both left Google, so we are not, as you say, stuck in the vortex.

If you have more specific questions, I'd be happy to provide additional clarification.

There is a bit of overlap here with my comments on HN the last couple of days. I've had to explain it to 100+ friends, family, customers, clients, etc, so I figured I might as well polish it and put it somewhere public.

At the risk of stating the obvious: I am not "HN's Japan Guy." There are many, many HNers in Japan. A few dozen of them make it out to the Tokyo meetups. There are many, many perspectives on this disaster -- this is just my wee little contribution from a place well removed from most of the worst scenes.

Best startup hiring post I have seen on HN in years.

Fail, fail, fail until you succeed; I really like Google's resolve when it comes to breaking into social networking. I guess I also like any serious challenge to Facebook.

Can't wait for the details.

The article is mostly correct, but a few corrections from a nuclear engineer:

1. What he refers to as "moderator rods" are actually control rods. The term "moderator" refers to a material that is unlikely to absorb neutrons, but likely to scatter them. This helps lower the average neutron speed inside the reactor, which actually increases the fission rate. Since water serves this purpose just fine, most reactors do not have specific "moderator rods", although BWRs actually run pipes of liquid water through the fuel assemblies for additional moderation.

2. BWRs are not run all-rods-out, like he claims. BWRs are generally run with significant control rod insertion, so that the water stays liquid for a greater portion of the height of the core.

3. He doesn't quite explain that the source of the hydrogen is a replacement reaction where zirconium and water react to create zirconium oxide and hydrogen gas.

4. Xenon-135 is a fission product, not produced by neutron activation, and neutron activation of coolant is nothing to sneer at (the half-life of tritium is 12.3 years).

It's interesting to contrast the Japanese style of online identity (which inspired 4chan) and the style that Zuckerberg is trying to promote.

Millions of Japanese have profiles on sites like Pixiv (popular art site with ~15m images) or Nico Nico Douga (popular video site with ~15m videos). They create art, videos, etc, and upload them under a name. Many of these people earn money off their work, publishing doujinshi at Comiket, creating art and promotional videos for commercial games, and so forth.

But there's no attempt to ensure that these are real names. Typically they're aliases. Even their most popular social networking site, Mixi, works the same way. To the Japanese, there's absolutely no reason why "my life as a doujin artist" and, say, "my life as a software engineer", should be given the same name.

Interestingly enough, this is how it often seems to have worked in the West as well... prior to Facebook.