StackOverflow, the granddaddy of programming Q&A sites, has begun a long, inexorable decline into irrelevance.

I won’t talk here about how “StackOverflow sucks”; you can google that. Most of those people are complaining about how unfriendly SO is to newcomers. I don’t care about that. I actually think it should be more unfriendly to newcomers, who pollute and dilute the site’s content. I want to talk about the fundamental dysfunction on the site, the poor experience for the experienced users who should matter, and the failure in both developing and implementing the strategy, which over time is slowly and surely going to ensure its demise.

StackOverflow’s major business is selling eyeballs of people who come to it via Google. It cannot be a good sign for this would-be Unicorn, then, that all traffic metrics are flat to declining. Part of the problem is that virtually all programmers in the world already now come to SO to find answers to their questions. Even to continue at current levels assumes that Google will continue to drive traffic to the site. Indeed, at present for many programming questions, a Google query brings up half a dozen answers from Stack Overflow on the first page. This is both a blessing (now) and a curse (in the future); as Google’s algorithms evolve, it could easily start bringing up fewer SO results, and this is especially likely to happen as overall answer/question quality declines, as discussed later.

So the only remaining growth potential is more programmers, new domains, more questions (meaning more views per person), new content models, or new forms of monetization.

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Following Tolstoy, “All successful startups are alike; each failed startup fails in its own way.” Some startups fail because of flawed product execution. Some fail because of poor marketing. Some fail because they can’t get the right people. Some fail because they run out of money. Some fail because they did not understand the marketplace and the competition.

This story is about an anonymous company that failed for a relatively unique reason: a yawning gap between vision and product concept.

You might think that vision already implies a product concept. Yet actually the same vision can be realized via many product concepts. This particular company’s vision was to automate enterprise knowledge management and distribution. A wonderful vision, but one which could take the form of many different product concepts. For instance, one concept would be to build a monolithic, closed, smart knowledge management system. A very different concept would be to build smart knowledge management widgets that fit into and complement existing knowledge/content management approaches.

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