What Happened at NewsGator
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What Happened at NewsGator
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: What Happened at NewsGator
#2"In late 2005 it acquired NetNewsWire and hired me."
"I shipped NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 on the Mac App Store, and a couple months later sold NetNewsWire to Black Pixel..."
How do you sell a product after it has been acquired by another company? Did he somehow retain independent ownership of the Lite version?
Re: What Happened at NewsGator
#3The writing here is very nice. I wish my writing carried itself as well. Beyond the style and structure, the tone of the article is remarkable and lovely. Cynicism wrapped in love and hope and nostalgia.
Nice work.
Re: What Happened at NewsGator
#4"In late 2005 it acquired NetNewsWire and hired me." "I shipped NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 on the Mac App Store, and a couple months later sold NetNewsWire to Black Pixel..." How do you sell a product after it has been acquired by another company? Did he somehow retain independent ownership of the Lite version?
It appears the article has been fixed to say "Newsgator sold..."
Re: What Happened at NewsGator
#5The writing here is very nice. I wish my writing carried itself as well. Beyond the style and structure, the tone of the article is remarkable and lovely. Cynicism wrapped in love and hope and nostalgia. Nice work.
The writing is good because the author fearlessly and shamelessly wrote a story about himself. The narrative is "man goes on a journey."[1] Imagine if he had tried to distance himself from events or cast himself as the cause. He allows the story to reflect real life and the reader to feel the ups and downs and apathy of the workplace from.our own experience. [2]
[1] The other story is "a stranger comes to town."
[2] This but with a bit more amplitude than perhaps is found in our lives. http://sivers.org/drama
Re: What Happened at NewsGator
#6Wonderfully written post. Reminds me of Dylan's: "The times they are a-changin'". The tech industry seems to be extremely dynamic.
Re: What Happened at NewsGator
#7It's nice to read a piece by someone who doesn't have a chip on his shoulder. So many times people leave employment bitter after a losing a hard-fought and divisive political battle. It says a lot about the author's character that he can calmly empathize with all of his colleagues, even through what were surely highly controversial and sensitive choices, like the decision to sell the author's application to a competitor.
Re: What Happened at NewsGator
#8"In addition to straight RSS reading it had some kind of controls for making groups of people. An admin could say, for instance, that all developers are subscribed to these ten feeds, plus whatever else they might want."
I had a similar idea a few years ago but didn't think there was a market for it. RSS feeds don't use up a lot of bandwidth so you couldn't use that angle (even in a country like South Africa, where I lived at the time, where bandwidth was limited and expensive). I also couldn't picture a company wanting to spend money on something as non-critical as RSS feeds. I wonder how wrong I was?
Re: What Happened at NewsGator
#9How much do things like this get sold for? Dollars or equity? 5, 6, 7 or 8 figures?
Re: What Happened at NewsGator
#10I remember when NewsGator bought FeedDemon, my RSS reader of choice on Windows. I was a little nervous but it went ok, for a while anyway. FeedDemon came to end-of-like quite naturally I feel. RSS just sort of died off for me the same way I think it did for many others. I think the problem with RSS is the information overload and addiction to more information. It just all gets too much once you hit a certain number of feeds. Now I don't use RSS for anything, at least not knowingly.