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The cloud shooting itself on the foot: dispatch.io/.cc and do.com
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Posted by Hugh
Oct 27, 2013 at 12:23 PM
It was ever thus.
In entrepreneurship classes at business school, the issue of the exit strategy always looms large. Trade sale? Private equity? Your choice may affect how you structure your start-up from the very beginning. Capital structure? Tax strategy? If you bring in outside advisors at any stage or if you seek venture-capital support, they’ll absolutely be taking a short-term view - and ‘short-term’ invariably means less than six years.
About fifteen years ago, I was involved with a number of small start-ups in a particular industry. All are now owned by very large international corporations, and many of their founders are consequently rich enough not to have to work again. I suspect that the only real difference between those companies and the internet start-ups we’re talking about in this thread is that they didn’t have hundreds of thousands of customers, some dependent on them.
But you can see why young entrepreneurs seek this way out. Launching and maintaining start-ups can be very hard and time-consuming work. You can do it at 25, but it’s not something you really want to be doing at 50.
Posted by Hugh
Oct 27, 2013 at 12:45 PM
Btw, “Unbuyer beware”. Like it!
Posted by James Sposto
Oct 28, 2013 at 10:21 PM
My concern, having a small startup in this space, that these aqui-hire and quick-turn exits will ruin the field for firms like ours (xtrant.com) who intend to grow and scale carefully and be around for the long haul. Fortunately our real-world clients don’t read startup news of follow our competitors, so they will likely miss this. But future potential paying users of our service may be jaded when our product gets on their radar.
At another time I may have indulged in Schadenfreude at the demise of tangential competitors, but now I’m more concerned about the industry itself.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 4, 2013 at 05:51 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Though in thinking about this, I realize there are two distinct “cloud”
>issues here: 1. Trusting your data to the cloud for use on local devices
>with locally running apps. 2. Trusting cloud-based apps.
>I am pretty comfortable with the first issue, especially in the case of
>Dropbox, where you keep a local copy of the data. Not only is the data
>safe, but it is safer, because you have the cloud back up (as long as
>you trust that it can’t be hacked). But I really see no reason to trust
>cloud-based apps. Over and over they have been proved unreliable, as
>your original post demonstrates.
In principle I agree, and I personally use Dropbox, Nomadesk and Livedrive at home and work within this context. In a similar way I use Google Apps: mail is locally copied as is available offline in my email client, as is calendar information which is synced with Outlook. There are other examples of such configurations, including Evernote.
Yet the borders between 1 and 2 are not so clearly marked: the cloud is not just a syncing or backup service. The functionality of locally running apps is often limited compared to that of its web counterparts. It’s not just collaboration (which is my primary reason for investing my time and money on cloud tools); in Dropbox, for example, in order to access previous versions of files—a very valuable functionality—after right clicking you are taken to the web app. Cloud tools often do not offer their own desktop apps, and one relies on third-party programs which do not necessarily replicate all functions one by one; an obvious example is Gmail.
By 2016, business financial investment on the cloud is to surpass that of local systems. Expect the functionality gap to widen rather than be bridged. Soon it will not be a question of getting a certain feature locally or through the cloud, because only the cloud will be offering it.
In theory, competition among brands should provide a wider choice to the consumer. Yet look at the incredible number of offerings in the smartphone market and try to find one which includes a physical keyboard (yes, there are a limited few, but they are the exception which confirms the rule). I expect similar “convergence” phenomenons in the application market.
Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 18, 2015 at 01:26 AM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Let’s not hold any illusions here: tools like Workflowy ... are
>not garage operations; not when they start serving tens of thousands of
>users who rely on these tools regularly and have very limited patience.
>You need serious money to support the server power and software
>debugging and maintenance over a reasonable period.
>
>The ‘two guys’ are just the tip of the iceberg; there’s surely a lot of
>outsourcing involved, as well as ‘unsung heroes’ in the backstage.
I was reminded of this conversation after seeing this recent blog post:
“WorkFlowy Co-Creators, Mike Turitzin & Jesse Patel on WorkFlowy’s Early Days”
http://blog.workflowy.com/2015/11/17/interview-jesse-mike-part-1/