Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

What's sadder for our society as a whole is that, despite this comment and the GP comment, this is happening, and will be allowed to happen by regulators who won't give this a second glance. And this sort of multi-billion-dollar absorption of a "better" company by a "worse" company is almost a weekly story.

Tech started out as a meritocracy, and a lot of us still operate personally in a meritocratic bubble, but, generally, this hasn't applied for a long time. As a whole, tech is leading the way forward in a neo-fuedalistic form of government. These political marriages to increase one's kingdom are a common affair, and they NEVER work to end-users' advantage. They only serve to make the kings and princes of the realms involved a lot of money.

The best we tech-end-users can do is grit our teeth, and hope that the acquisition doesn't ruin a product that we love and depend on. The one I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop on is GitHub. There's a LOT of people on this site (among many others) who crow about how Microsoft has changed, but time will tell. At the very least GitHub is going to get "FOR BUSINESS!" laced all through it. I note, for the record, that many of the high-profile Ruby people abandoned ship for Shopify after the sale. That's not usually a good sign.

Having been through a "merger of equals" of Fortune 150's -- and watching my very-good-company-to-work-for being broken up and sold for parts to float the bad company's survival -- I've learned this is all you have to do: watch who leaves and who stays. Ignore all the PR statements. They are literally worse than nothing. Watch what happens to the core tech people, and the distinct VP's. That will tell you what's really happening with the restructuring. In my company, the ring-1 exec's all cashed out their golden parachutes and left. You have to have some inside information to understand the players, so this is tough to do from an external observer's point of view.

> One login per day per person is the maximum number of times I would ever consider asking for authentication.

Yes. Pet peeve. I started a new web app, which was going to have to integrate with our internal SAML server. Managers in the meetings kept referring to it as our "single sign on" system. I finally heard the phrase one too many times, and stopped the discussion to clarify that a "single sign on" means you log into a system ONCE, and then it takes care of every other authentication. I pointed out that we ALL spend ALL day re-logging into everything, and that shut everyone up pretty fast.

And, yes, I'm fully aware that this sort of thing is why I'm not popular with our IT department.

Fun story. I started integrating my app with SAML, and took a couple of days to learn it. I asked for the key to their dev server for testing, and this led to a FOUR MONTH series of meetings and emails where they told me WILDLY inaccurate things, which I repeated back to make sure I understood what they were telling me, and they insisted these things were true. (Like, all I had to do was put something in my headers to "authenticate".) Around and around we went until some other manager on a call pointed out that what I repeated was WILDLY inaccurate, and I shouted, "I KNOW! THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING FOR FOUR MONTHS," which made my manager tell me to calm down, but which FINALLY got someone to point me to the right person, deep in the heart of India, who sent me exactly what I asked for at the start, and it worked the first time.

So, no, I don't care that I'm not popular with this group.

As just another average Joe/Jane, what can I do to influence anti-trust department that this merger is a bad idea for competition? It really does surprise me how many mergers are done purely for market capture reasons. The US Tech industry has a few bully behemoths who keep on getting bigger and a ton of smaller players.

"meritocracy" is a banned word at okta. We have a wiki page with over 80 words banned and 'discouraged' for inclusivity

definition: "Belief in the flawed idea that hard work and talent alone are all that’s needed to achieve success."

Thanks Todd!

Good