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Comment by cheez | Hacker News Reader

What the hell, why...

Edit: I'm sure it will have something to do with their design skills, which are pretty good!

Actually, I think Sofa fits really interestingly in Facebook if they're wanting to go up against Foursquare and Square. Sofa has a bunch of experience with point-of-sale interactions. Maybe Facebook is going to reinvent the cash register/purchasing experience.

Or maybe it's just a talent acquisition. :)

Also that Facebook is trying to build a desktop software team. May be they too want to own the clients.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/27/facebook-desktop/

Maybe an application that has Facebook features + Facebook Chat a la Gtalk / Aim + Some sort of Skype integration to enable video chat for its users ..

It's ridiculously hard to find amazing icon illustrators.

really? dribble.com has loads.

> really? dribble.com has loads.

You meant dribbble.com. But yes ... these days it's pretty easy to find a good icon designer.

Online, sure. In real life though?

That's a tremendously small percentage of designers. Consider the number of people that get into design, the number of designers who are extremely good at what they do, AND the number who get into icon design.

probably talent acquisition?

Since they didn't buy any of their software, it's most definitely a talent acquisition.

Was it none of the software? I had a tough time reading it... seemed like definitely two pieces were out, but the e-commerce stuff might have been in?

No, Checkout and Enstore are staying with Sofa's JV partner, Acclivity, makers of the US versions of MYOB.

On one hand this stinks because Acclivity has shown little ability to create excellent software. On the other hand, Sofa's development speed is crazy slow. Way too much pixel-pushing.

Does anyone know how often Facebook does this? Is this just one of many that happened to make news?

There have been a decent number of them recently. Facebook had also previously said that the talent acquisitions are working for them and they plan to keep doing them.

Facebook recently had job posting for desktop application product manager. These sofa guys seem to develop UIs for desktop apps.

That team will be here in Seattle[1]. Sofa explicitly says they're moving to Palo Alto.

[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2011/facebook-making-windows-mac-des...

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