For once, Betteridge’s law of headlines is refuted.
This is a fascinating insight into the heady days of 2005 when Yahoo was the cool company snapping up all the best products like Flickr, Upcoming, and Del.icio.us. It all goes downhill from there.
There’s no mention of the surprising coda.
Paul Ford explains version control in a way that is clear and straightforward, while also being wistful and poetic.
I had idle fantasies about what the world of technology would look like if, instead of files, we were all sharing repositories and managing our lives in git: book projects, code projects, side projects, article drafts, everything. It’s just so damned … safe. I come home, work on something, push the changes back to the master repository, and download it when I get to work. If I needed to collaborate with other people, nothing would need to change. I’d just give them access to my repositories (repos, for short). I imagined myself handing git repos to my kids. “These are yours now. Iteratively add features to them, as I taught you.”
Oh my goodness! Maciej is channelling Jason Scott:
Delicious has over a billion bookmarks and is a fascinating piece of web history. Even Yahoo, for whom mismanagement is usually effortless, had to work hard to keep Delicious down. I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.
If your startup gets acquired and shut down by a larger company, this is the way to announce it—no “we’re excited to announce”; no “incredible journey”. Instead there’s an apology and regret (which is exactly what your users will be feeling).
An acquisition, or an aqui-hire, is always a failure. Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or – far likelier – they failed to dream big enough. The proper ambition for a tech entrepreneur should be to join the ranks of the great tech companies, or, at least, to create a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders.
The story of one site’s disgraceful handling of acquisition and shutdown (Punchfork, acquired by Pinterest) and how its owner actively tried to block efforts to preserve user’s data.
A collection of those appalling doublespeek announcements that sites and services give when they get acquired. You know the ones: they begin with “We’re excited to announce…” and end with people’s data being flushed down the toilet.
Biting satire that hits its mark superbly. Ouch! Be careful — this is sharp …and funny.
This post by Jason Fried is three years old but it’s more relevant than ever.
What a loss. Is that the best the next generation can do? Become part of the old generation? How about kicking the shit out of the old guys? What ever happened to that?
Maciej delivers a rant worthy of Paul Robert Lloyd.
Probably old news by now but Last.fm has been acquired by CBS, who I hope are not evil. The good news is that our favourite music site is staying in London. Rock on, FMers.
An interesting take on the recent round of acquisitions by Yahoo.
Yahoo! acquires Upcoming.org. First Flickr, now this. Yahoo! are snapping up all the coolest social apps.