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Fable is winding down

fable.app

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Re: Fable is winding down

#61

Post by from-nibly »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #37
jwr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a solo bootstrapped SaaS. When people sometimes ask me whether I think this is a stable business, I tell them that with a VC-funded company, it's almost certain that there will be an outcome in several years that will not be good for customers. VC-funded companies go bankrupt, get acqui-hired, or get strategically acquired most of the time, and all these outcomes are bad for customers. The only outcome which is…

Wouldn’t the low credibility VCs, who don’t care about customers being thrown under the bus, be displaced by higher credibility VCs over time?

Even when the product isnt free, the customer is the product. The real customer is investors. Unless there are no investors this is the way things go.

Re: Fable is winding down

#62

Post by from-nibly »

webstrand wrote: post #16
sentientslug wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says in the article “the Fable file format is not transferable to other platforms.”

So export a structured dump of all relevant data and leave it up to someone else to decipher.

Do you know what's less work and less legally fraught? Doing nothing.

Re: Fable is winding down

#63

Post by oidar »

tptacek wrote: post #58
itake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn’t though. You could scale down to a 1-3 person team. Stop building new features. Keep a full stack dev on for 1year to fix bugs and the remaining team does customer support. Hiring a contracting company for 3 mo per year to perform updates. My guess is the decision maker doesn’t think it’s worth their time to run a business like this. Instead of rapidly shifting focus into a higher growth area, they w…

A 1-3 person team in the US is a half million per annum proposition, and, again, even if you could make the payroll, you have to retain qualified engineers for a role that has zero growth potential.

What about in India? the Philippines?

Re: Fable is winding down

#64

Post by tptacek »

oidar wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1-3 person team in the US is a half million per annum proposition, and, again, even if you could make the payroll, you have to retain qualified engineers for a role that has zero growth potential.

What about in India? the Philippines?

Anyways: that's generally why it's not going to happen.

Re: Fable is winding down

#66

Post by moralestapia »

stonogo wrote: post #23
franze wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open Sourcing is a lot of work. Plus it might contain (even huge) parts that can not be open sourced. And even unknown parts where real ownership and patents might be unknown.

Where did this bizarre myth start? You apache-license the code you wrote, write a paragraph about code isn't yours or you're not sure about and is therefore missing, and move on with your life. Patent indemnification is not your problem, it's the problem of whoever wants to use the code.

Can't agree more.

Erlang, FoundationDB, there's plenty of success stories of products who were EOL at some point and open sourcing was the thing that made them explode in popularity.

I think Fable is a very-high quality product, it's unfortunate it didn't materialize as a business, but the software has enough quality and popularity to maybe become something like the Blender of that niche; a thing that would be extremely beneficial to any of the founders' future endeavors.

Re: Fable is winding down

#67

Post by itake »

tptacek wrote: post #58
itake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn’t though. You could scale down to a 1-3 person team. Stop building new features. Keep a full stack dev on for 1year to fix bugs and the remaining team does customer support. Hiring a contracting company for 3 mo per year to perform updates. My guess is the decision maker doesn’t think it’s worth their time to run a business like this. Instead of rapidly shifting focus into a higher growth area, they w…

A 1-3 person team in the US is a half million per annum proposition, and, again, even if you could make the payroll, you have to retain qualified engineers for a role that has zero growth potential.

1-3 people to do customer support do not cost $500k.

you don't have to retain qualified engineers b/c you hire a contracting company that manages employee growth within their own organization.

Re: Fable is winding down

#68

Post by tptacek »

itake wrote: post #67
tptacek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1-3 person team in the US is a half million per annum proposition, and, again, even if you could make the payroll, you have to retain qualified engineers for a role that has zero growth potential.

1-3 people to do customer support do not cost $500k. you don't have to retain qualified engineers b/c you hire a contracting company that manages employee growth within their own organization.

Serious contract engineers cost more, not less. This isn't a Fiverr job.

Re: Fable is winding down

#69

Post by notpushkin »

invaderzirp wrote: post #12
notpushkin wrote: post #6

> On November 15, 2024, the Fable product will be shut down. All users will no longer be able to sign up, log in, or access files. All customer data and project files will be permanently deleted [...] > We recommend you look through your Fable files and export your projects off the platform (e.g. to mp4, gif, lottie… etc). I genuinely am at a loss for words here. Somebody sat down and decided that giving you your pro…

This shouldn't be surprising anymore. This has happened every week since 2010. This is the VC cycle, and it happens over and over and over and over and over again. In fact, I'm sure there's some flashy new thing on the front page right now that will have its own corresponding "goodbye" thread in 2-10 years, and everyone will get screwed by that, too. We can lament the current state of affairs, but let's not pretend i…

Yeah, this is the “disappointed but not surprised” kind of situation.

Re: Fable is winding down

#70

Post by samuelstros »

paulgb wrote: post #50
samuelstros wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webapps will work locally soon. Say hello to OPFS https://web.dev/articles/origin-private-file-system . Works surprisingly good, see this demo app https://fink2.onrender.com/

Sadly, I don’t think Safari or Firefox are close to shipping OPFS. https://caniuse.com/?search=File%20System

OPFS works in Safari, see this demo app https://csv-n2qj.onrender.com/.

What doesn't work in Safari and Firefox is (non sandboxed) access to the files of a user. OPFS is sandboxed.

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