441–450 of 528 posts
$610M, all cash??? How were they worth that much... all they seemed to ever do was rebrand
I hope I am wrong.
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> How often has that ever been a good decision? It got them acquired, so certainly it worked for them this time. > doing the hard work of building a great product How often has that ever been a good decision?
You're assuming that Dia is what Atlassian wanted in this acquisition, and nothing else. We don't know what things would look like if they had continued developing Arc. Almost every successful company has got there by grinding away on hard problems. No one launches a product and gets endless growth for free. Not to say that Arc would have definitely succeeded, but to date it's been a lot more successful than Dia.
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Even though I run it full time now personally; I still think Linux has massive problems something like Windows or macOS don't have: app development. You can't target a thing, you have to target all the things and bloat your app like crazy so you might as well just ship a chromium based app because its practically the same thing anyway (shipping an entire userland because its not stable anyway)
If there were instead 10 viable and competitive desktop operating system with no clear leader, and macos and windows were there just among the others.. wouldn't you try to target as many as you can? Maybe we can think of linux itself as a microcosm of OSes we never got to have, and you have to target as many variants as you can in order for no dominant force to emerge. It ain't pretty but its what we have..
The way this all gets worked around is that people come up with stuff like Docker or Flatpak that ship their own copies of as many dependencies as possible. The disadvantage is that now I can't just patch an OpenSSL vulnerability by updating the system's copy of OpenSSL, the way Windows can for all software built on SChannel.
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Building an OS is easy and straightforward. Now let's make that OS talk to a graphics card--whoops, no Nvidia for you, peon! An OS isn't a problem. Hardware support on an OS--that's a huge problem.
And then make people want to write for (and make money off)
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AFAICT, Sun’s underlying vision was more on the side of pervasive RPC and/or downloadable code, i.e. closer to DCOM or NeWS than HTTP. (We have in fact ultimately ended up layering downloadable code on top of HTTP. I don’t think I like the results, yet some of the things I don’t like seem inherent to downloadable code in general.)
It was more than this. The Sun Ray thin clients were so frigging impressive. The problem wasn't the tech, the problem was it was SUN. It ran on Sun Hardware, with Sun Software and all at Sun Prices. Metaframe was just so much cheaper (it was also hot garbage but thats another story).
And of course I'm speaking on the context of what I'm building, not the world we're in. There are plenty of platforms that are more important than what they platform. I believe it was Bill Gates that said the value of all the things on the platform must exceed the platform itself. We have some inversions at present that are ripe to undergo Rayleigh–Taylor instability.
I use Safari day-to-day, but its behaviors are inconsistent with caching which makes development hell. I notice this caching behavior even when you have it disabled in the network developer tools.
Is this the most valuable acquisition of a zero revenue company ever? I understand there's been larger acquisitions of unprofitable companies, but zero revenue at all is truly special.
The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform. Arc had pretty good market validation with early adopters, they say that growth was flattened out but IMO that's normal for most products, and it's up to the company to find out WHY growth flattened and then solve that problem. Not kill the product and chase some en…
This wasn't a new insight by Arc. ChromeOS exists. Palm's WebOS was a thing. Even Apple pitched rich web apps as the avenue for 3rd party developers to make things for the original iPhone, they were just a bit too early. There is even Electron, for web apps to run as desktop apps on all major operating systems. Most browsers can also turn any website into a self-contained web app that lives along side other local app…