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Comment by yoshamano | Hacker News Reader

My first reaction to reading the title was "why?"

After reading the article (and then reading it again) I'm not left feeling confident that this is in any way positive for me as a LastPass Premium and Xmarks customer.

In particular the vague line about, "As we become part of the LogMeIn family over the next several months, we’ll be releasing updates to LastPass, introducing new features..." To me, LastPass is feature complete. So either I'm going to have a mind blowing, I never knew I needed that, moment, or more likely some sort of bloated crap is going to get shoe horned into LastPass.

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LogMeIn purchased, and absolutely ruined, Hamachi back in 2006. That program was the perfect lightweight virtual LAN client in existence with all the necessary features. Within months of acquisition, Hamachi had several "updates" and became bloated beyond recognition, slow, buggy, and downright unreliable. I have the worst taste in my mouth from what LogMeIn did to a perfectly working product and won't use anything they offer because of it.

I forgot about Hamachi! I used to love that back in college, and you are right, they destroyed it. Salted the earth.

Yeah, they really ruined Hamachi. There isn't really a suitable replacement even now, to the best of my knowledge. I still resent them for that.

I hope they don't ruin LastPass also, but from here on out I'll be intensely skeptical.

Suitable (and open source) replacement:

https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne

https://www.zerotier.com/

Also does a lot of other things, and is evolving into a full-fledged SDN layer. If you don't want to use the pretty GUI they give you to create/manage networks you can run your own 'network controller' -- see READMEs in GitHub.

> My first reaction to reading the title was "why?"

You're reading Hacker News. You know what "exit" means.

This is true, but my first reaction was as a LastPass customer not as an observer of the company.

I also agree with colinplamondon's comment "The thing I liked about LastPass was that it seemed like the highly geeky, less startupy approach to password managers, more likely to be run for the long-term, less likely to be at risk of an acquisition."

So the thought of them seeking an exit never crossed my mind.

makes the point that this startup culture with a focus on exits and maker founders and VCs rich is often not beneficial to our customers

And I think at some point the customers are going to figure out that the startup merry-go-round is and never was intended for their benefit. Over time it's going to get harder for new startups to attract customers because people will realize that flashy new product offerings aren't likely to stick around (in a form that we actually want) for long.

And since "exit" has come to mean 50%+ chance that customers will be screwed over it also means that in the future having a decentralized product will be KEY to actually get investor money - there's only so many times this get-customers-screw-customers round-about can spin before it gets uninteresting from a capital gain standpoint.

I'm not so sure. It's also possible the it will always work, and what happens is you lose the early, informed users, and gain new users who are more moved by marketing.

Logmein is still in business, and buying companies. At first blush it seems like they'd be a good company to have a stake in.

The product is going to merged with another password manager LogMeIn acquired, Meldium.

Insert here, obligatory link to Our Incredible Journey (http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com)

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