Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

End of the Road for Xmarks

blog.xmarks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 111 posts

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#101

Post by japherwocky »

raganwald wrote: post #99
raganwald wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero respect for the people behind the service, really? I have zero respect for your comment but I stop well short of saying I have zero respect for you. Things are probably not that simple. They have investors. It may not be a case of "Hey, we can make a business that pays for three guys to eat." Perhaps their investors need to see a certain minimum return or else the investors would rather close up shop. Maybe they…

p.p.s. I was exaggerating when I said "zero respect for your comment." I was just trying to make a point about the difference between criticizing someone's point and criticizing them personally. But now that I think about it, I was a little rude. I apologize.

I'm a big boy on the internet, I don't mind a flame at all, especially in response to a provocative post.

If you spend years, and millions of dollars, and don't make _any_ attempt to bring _any_ money in the door, I think you are making a mockery of the entire startup culture.

It's a business. What part of that do they not get?

Maybe maybe maybe, maybe they could try being a business and not seriously expect that some magical revenue stream is going to come knocking at their door with sacks full of cash.

Who funded these people? How can you seem to be so technically competent and marketing savvy, and not have a shred of business sense?

Are they going to go "focus on the next thing"?

Do they really deserve to be given funding for anything?

I think if you take someone else's money under the pretense of creating a business, you have some responsibility to the entire system to actually _try_ to create a business. And they haven't!

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#102

Post by whopa »

frossie wrote: post #53
whopa wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Mozilla has an app for syncing your bookmarks to your iPhone: https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/home/

Yeah - thanks for pointing that out. It's not a true bidirectional sync though, like xmarks, right?

No, it doesn't do bidirectional sync, at least not yet.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#103

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

dillydally wrote: post #91
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a fairly shocking hypothesis. My feeling was that the lesson from this is don't go into a business if you don't have at least a vague idea how you're going to make money out of it. I love XMarks and I'll absolutely miss it (and would have considered paying for it) but this would seem to be niaivity in the extreme.

It was founded by Mitch Kapor. I think he knows a thing or two about starting companies...

I don't care who founded them, they've just announced that they're closing citing a lack of a viable business model.

That would seem to suggest that they might have thought about revenue a little earlier in the process and I have a feeling that with hindsight Mitch Kapor might agree.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#104

Post by sjs »

mitjak wrote: post #94
sjs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instapaper. I know that's kind of a cop-out but incidentally it (and Google) have killed my use of bookmarks apart from a relatively svelte bookmarks bar. Instapaper is my reading queue, Google is my long-term memory. Bookmarks are more like shortcuts for me now. The nice thing is that I can "bookmark" any link from any browser that I use, as well as twitter and RSS. And I have them instantly on my iPad, phone, noteb…

What do you mean by Google? Google Bookmarks, the Chrome sync? Google Notebook? :)

Oh, just Google's search. If I want to find something I previously read I Google it now instead of sifting through crufty, old, poorly organized and needlessly hierarchical bookmarks. Tagged bookmarks would help there I guess (like Delicious) but then you have to tag everything...

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#105

Post by raganwald »

japherwocky wrote: post #101
raganwald wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

p.p.s. I was exaggerating when I said "zero respect for your comment." I was just trying to make a point about the difference between criticizing someone's point and criticizing them personally. But now that I think about it, I was a little rude. I apologize.

I'm a big boy on the internet, I don't mind a flame at all, especially in response to a provocative post. If you spend years, and millions of dollars, and don't make _any_ attempt to bring _any_ money in the door, I think you are making a mockery of the entire startup culture. It's a business. What part of that do they not get? Maybe maybe maybe, maybe they could try being a business and not seriously expect that som…

I wasn't flaming you.sifting through your follow-up, I find a few interesting items. First, indeed who did fund them? Have you asked the investors if they are unhappy? Ifnthe investors are unhappy, what went wrong with the governance? Why are we even assuming management is to blame? How do we know what happened? Maybe the finders wanted to generate cash flow but were nixed by the investors who wanted growth at the expense of revenues in the hope of being bought by Google?

Another thing. What is this responsibility you speak of? A funded startup exists to find an equilibrium between the needs of the investors and the needs of the founders. Nobody else gets a say in what happens. They have zero obligation to do what you want them to do if you aren't sitting on their board.

It sounds to me like you have strong opinions about what is and isn't the right way to do a startup. You might be right, but still there's something disquieting about taking a culture based on disruption and revolution and writing rules for what is and isn't the right way to revolt against the existing business structure.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#106

Post by japherwocky »

raganwald wrote: post #105
japherwocky wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big boy on the internet, I don't mind a flame at all, especially in response to a provocative post. If you spend years, and millions of dollars, and don't make _any_ attempt to bring _any_ money in the door, I think you are making a mockery of the entire startup culture. It's a business. What part of that do they not get? Maybe maybe maybe, maybe they could try being a business and not seriously expect that som…

I wasn't flaming you.sifting through your follow-up, I find a few interesting items. First, indeed who did fund them? Have you asked the investors if they are unhappy? Ifnthe investors are unhappy, what went wrong with the governance? Why are we even assuming management is to blame? How do we know what happened? Maybe the finders wanted to generate cash flow but were nixed by the investors who wanted growth at the ex…

Fair enough, maybe the investors told them not to generate cash flow. In which case, the investors are twits and deserve to lose their investment. My point is, whoever made that decision has been hitting the silicon valley kool-aid way too hard.

(Do you really think I'm saying they are responsible to my opinions? You seem like a smarter guy than that.)

I do have strong opinions about the right way to borrow money from other people:

When someone like Xmarks.com flops, it makes startups look bad to the 2 million users who are going to think twice about storing their data on someone's servers. It makes startups look bad to people who would like to make a return on their investment.

You can disrupt and revolt and rethink and metaprogram all you'd like, especially if you're sitting on VC funding. You can call cashflow an "existing business structure", but at some point, eventually, I think you need to charge something for something.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#107

Post by tomica »

mitjak wrote: post #41
sjs wrote: post #10

Chrome killed my use of Xmarks. With a consistent, cross-platform browser that has syncing out-of-the-box I no longer need Xmarks. I mainly use other browsers for testing now.

Ditto here but I can't think of a way to bring those bookmarks over to Safari to sync with the iPhone, aside from using Xmarks. Any ideas?

firefox sync and firefox home?

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#108

Post by dillydally »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #103
dillydally wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was founded by Mitch Kapor. I think he knows a thing or two about starting companies...

I don't care who founded them, they've just announced that they're closing citing a lack of a viable business model. That would seem to suggest that they might have thought about revenue a little earlier in the process and I have a feeling that with hindsight Mitch Kapor might agree.

Funny. Do you have any actual information about how early they tried to find a business model? I suspect you don't.

So, the situation is this: we have a product lots of people want. The naive business model (freemium) won't work -- a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that.

What do you do? Go forward building a very popular product and look for a business model, or quit because you can't think of how to make money from day 1?

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#109

Post by dillydally »

japherwocky wrote: post #92
ajg1977 wrote: post #26

Man, I'm gutted. I use Xmarks every day to sync from my work & windows machines (Firefox) to my MacBook (Safari) and thus to my iPhone / iPad. I'd have happily paid $5 a month or so to use Xmarks and I imagine I'm not alone. It's really unfortunate that they won't even try the freemium, or (shock!) even the outright pay to play approach. I'm sure with two million users there would have been enough paying customers to…

I cannot comprehend how they aren't even going to TRY to charge for ANYTHING. How the fuck do they think this whole cash flow thing works? 2 million users, and they don't even put out a god damn paypal donation widget? Show ads? Freemium anything? Charge something outrageous, lose 90% of your 2 million users, and you'll still have a significant monthly income. This is just the stupidest news I've heard in a while. Ze…

Don't be an ass. You don't know the first thing about the people working there and what they have or haven't tried.

A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that a freemium, subscription, or (uhm...) donation model won't work. We're talking six-figure revenue, most likely.

I guarantee you their current business model of modifying the SERPs and inserting links to Amazon and other affiliate programs is generating an order of magnitude more revenue than your proposed model would.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#110

Post by dillydally »

japherwocky wrote: post #101
raganwald wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

p.p.s. I was exaggerating when I said "zero respect for your comment." I was just trying to make a point about the difference between criticizing someone's point and criticizing them personally. But now that I think about it, I was a little rude. I apologize.

I'm a big boy on the internet, I don't mind a flame at all, especially in response to a provocative post. If you spend years, and millions of dollars, and don't make _any_ attempt to bring _any_ money in the door, I think you are making a mockery of the entire startup culture. It's a business. What part of that do they not get? Maybe maybe maybe, maybe they could try being a business and not seriously expect that som…

They made plenty of attempts. You're just ignorant of them.
Post reply on HN