It's official: Google buys Zenter
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
This doesn't answer your question about Zenter, but it should about Google...
I believe the back end is Java.
Will the founders survive at the Googleplex for long?
Was Google's earlier vaporware announcement a strategy to get Zenter at a lower cost? Probably not, as they really need that app one way or another for the suite. Excellent recovery that Zenter got bought instead of ending up on ebay.
Also congratulations to the Y Combinator team - yet another good call added to the record. The PR from this will be big.
Would they have survived a presentation-ware duel with Google or would they have suffered a fate similar to Kiko's?
I can't remember when I first heard about Zenter but it seems like I've been anticipating its release for a while. We generally hear that it's good to release early and update often so I'm interested in the story behind all of this.
Would it have been better for them to hold out and build a user base so they could be acquired for more money?
I was wondering about this as well, then I read this post. It must have an impact on the 'engineers' who work there having groups of buyouts with vesting periods and larger payouts. There must be some level of resentment (it's human nature). How does google manage this?
Maybe N years ago when google was a little startup. In every big company there is the rule that you need to do a specific stuff, and this is the worst thing that an hacker can suffer, at least in my experience: all the hackers I know tend to switch domain every few months, just the time to understand "how it works".
In some ways post - acquisition isn't, 'job-done'. It makes more sense to see the task through integration in the new company. It is still your baby and I'll bet anyone working on it would see it that way. At the same time It would make sense also to give yourself a cut-off date working for soft-co.
Congratulations are in order, in any case!
Seriously, making something people want was exactly what the Zenters did. Everyone could see at Demo Day that they'd made something users would like.
So if you make things that other want, did zenter purposefully make it's product to fill the gap in google office? If so it's a risky (ballsy) strategy to compete head to head with google if they have announced their intentions. What I want to know is what happened in the following 2 months?
Was zenter X times better than the internal version?
Happy 1st Father's Day Wayne!