271–280 of 310 posts
Isn't this the joke from The Office with WOOPH or whatever it was... and an old program called Pidgin? Nothing innovative here that's crazy
Haha I was thinking about that, but the joke is actually the reverse of this. When someone sends you a WUPHF, you receive it on every medium. Phone, email, fax, text. Beeper does the opposite, anytime you receive something on one of these platforms, it consolidates it to the Beeper app
Automattic sometimes acquires companies and does nothing with them - like with Simplenote. As an early Beeper user, I am disappointed!
Honestly, Automattic is probably one of the best exit routes for them. They have a history of being a good steward of their acquisitions. Compared to other companies that either shut them down or enshittify their products as a manner of course, it's valuable when a company can simply maintain their acquisitions alive and keep them running, at least giving them a chance to grow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No matter what, as long as we continue to communicate with each other, messaging will never die. Individual messaging platforms will come and go but the idea of instant messaging has existed for about as long as the internet. $175M might be a steal if Beeper gets more mass market appeal.
Yeah, my first response was going to be that the paid messaging app business model hasn't worked that entire time. But what we've learned from Whatsapp is that there may be other ways to monetize (Whatsapp Business). Still not an obvious bet IMO but you're right that owning the messaging layer is valuable.
How much of this is a long-term bet that the US DOJ's antitrust case against Apple (at least the iMessage-specific argument) will result in the forced opening up of the platform, such that Beeper (now Automattic) will sustainably function?
Pidgin Reminds me of why I used https://pidgin.im 20-years ago. It was an aggregator chat app.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still choose WP over Wix or SquareSpace when given the option. Self hosting a bunch of WP sites on a DigitalOcean instance and mirroring them all through CloudFlare is probably the cheapest way to run high traffic read-only sites. Toss in ServerPilot and you can spin up sites about as quickly as you could doing the Wix onboarding. My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)
Static HTML is even cheaper. I don't understand how some people can't think outside of CMS land
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Automattic does like $200~$300M in revenue.
That doesn't sound much considering they employ like 2k people, that's $100k per worker and considering they're tech workers that would just cover their pay
Also they hire all around the world where $100k/yr is the exception and not the norm.