51–60 of 310 posts
If they had to get acquired, Automattic is most likely the best I could've hoped for. The backing of a large company might help Beeper get more formalized APIs since they depend on hidden APIs and hacks to do what they do.
Is Automattic big enough to achieve that? You'd think they would be making a pretty penny from Wordpress.com and Tumblr, but these days you wouldn't pick either one over the competition (Wix, Squarespace Threads, IG etc).
Smart of Beeper to accept an acquisition/exit as soon as possible before their product gets further eroded by non-public APIs they're reliant on. Tough to build a business where at any time your product can get wiped out by Apple/Meta.
I wonder if the plan is to merge Beeper and Texts.com. They both look verify similar in their features. Maybe texts.com for the Apple Ecosystem and Beeper for the Android one ? After all, Beeper just released their new version of the app for Android.
One app for Apple and another for Android kinda defeats the purpose of "all in one platform", wouldn't it?
I wonder what the angle is here. Is Automattic going to help them fight a legal battle against Apple’s practices with locking down their computing devices and platforms? Do they even have the resources for that? Or is this just an acquihire and abandonment of that whole messaging thing?
I'm no MBA, but it might be better business strategy to pile up a million dollars and light it on fire
Beeper were not important enough to be listed: https://audrey.co/
"Our privacy policy and terms of service remain the same, though they may change in the future."
Reminder: wordpress.com shares data with 851 other companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would not be surprised if this was their plan from day 1: (1) Create a product which relies on non-public APIs which can be disabled at any time. (2) Generate lots of press visibility. (3) Sell itself to some gullible org before the whole thing comes crashing down.
What makes automattic gullible?
> Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper
It certainly sounds like…
Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage (brand aweness is only good if it means people actually want to use your product, not active distrust it), so the friend and early investor CEO of Automattic saved their failing personal investment by bailing them out and letting automattic foot the bill.
Nice having a friend CEO, huh?
I mean, you’ve got to hope/believe the other folk at automattic did their due diligence, but it does look like automattic is paying the bills for their CEO to bail out their friends.
That would make them gullible and seems pretty shady unless they really do have some astonishing reason to expect this to pay off… or they got it dirt cheap, in my opinion.
Smart of Beeper to accept an acquisition/exit as soon as possible before their product gets further eroded by non-public APIs they're reliant on. Tough to build a business where at any time your product can get wiped out by Apple/Meta.
With all the new regulations coming out of the EU, I think that if Beeper stays around long enough they might actually live to see the day where these networks have official APIs.
Automattic sometimes acquires companies and does nothing with them - like with Simplenote. As an early Beeper user, I am disappointed!