Motorola Shutting Down 280 Slides | Hacker News Reader

Motorola Shutting Down 280 Slides

280slides.com

I don't know how the developers are feeling, but years ago I was in a similar situation a couple different times. Poured my heart and soul into excellent best in class design and then had it all yanked out and dumped in a vat of acid. Years of my work, of my life, was gone and squandered and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. The couple thousand hours of unpaid overtime was just insult on top of injury. The last time it happened was from a decision by clueless MBAs after a hostile talent acquisition by a Fortune 500 outfit. The talent doesn't always stick around after that sort of shafting. It's like someone has murdered your baby and then wants to to stick around and help them move furniture across town. No thanks.

One of the best arguments for open source is your work can't be trashed and dismissed by financiers and people with business degrees who have no taste and no idea how to create anything. The one thing that redeemed HP in its recent move to trash WebOS was the decision to open source it. Without that, many of the best engineers on the project would have ended up leaving the company in disgust.

If by developers you mean the founders, I'd reckon they are feeling pretty good all said and done.

It's common knowledge that a vast majority of acquisitions fail and end up shutting down post acq. So while I can understand your frustration for your unpaid work, it can be assumed that these guys were very well paid. It makes it less similar to your situation.

I apologize for confusing things by bringing up too many issues at once. In particular, I did briefly mention pay, it was meant to be a brief aside, and should not have because it's irrelevant to the point as it pertains to money. Obviously I was paid a lot, but on salary one does not receive overtime pay for extra hours. Extra hours are thus a free will donation to the project. The idea I was trying to express, but failed to do well was that, if I knew in advance my work would be annihilated, I would never have bothered caring too much about it or staying past 5 to meet an important deadline or working all weekend on a bug fix.

It's not about money. It's about having one's powerful creative work destroyed by imbeciles.

I have 630,000 hours alive before I will die from birth to death. About 200,000 of them remain. The clock is ticking right now. Each hour that passes is lost and will never ever be recovered. The time of talented individuals is best spent contributing, not pissing their talent away in futility.

I did not make the same mistake of youth I describe above ever again. Since then I have always retained control and/or ownership of my work. I gently advise others to consider doing the same.

The purpose of my post was to express sympathy and empathy with their tremendous loss, not disdain for not being rich enough. I am already rich enough, what I can't get more of is hours remaining.

I wish I could give you 10 upvotes for this. Time and passion is not equivalent, not even freely interchangeable, with money.

My comment from the day the acquisition was announced:

"pg, please, please get the people building awesome tools to become ridiculously profitable like Wufoo! I so wanted to use 280 North but I was scared they would get bought and vanish. My fear came true. EDIT: Half true. No word yet on what Motorola is going to do with them. Congrats to the 280 Norths, YC, and their other investors. Let's all join hands and pray that Motorola allows development on Cappuccino et al to remain public."

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631036

And Cappuccino development does continue out in the open. There's no risk of the project dying because of anything Motorola could do to it.

I never really thought of 280 Slides as a "real" app anyway. It always just felt like a demo for Cappuccino.

One more nail in the coffin for recommending web-based services.

It does feel to me that joining YC and then taking a significant funding round afterwards is producing a lot of auditions where either the product is outright shut down or only parts are kept.

Sure looking from a higher level these may push forward innovation. Just makes it harder for us early adopters to justify investing time in using their apps/services.

Which Motorolla? Google's, or Motorolla's? [context question]

Since it is Motorola Mobility, shouldn't that be Google's[1]?

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/17/2570039/motorola-mobility...

Until the merger is complete, it's very important that Google and Motorola Mobility continue to behave as independent companies. Since this deal is under scrutiny by the FTC, I doubt that Google would put their acquisition at risk over a project as small as 280 Slides.

Could the fact that Google already has a presentation app be used as an excuse to close it down?

Is 280 Atlas also dead? It seems like there hasn't been any movement on the public beta in 9 months.

"761st day of the Atlas Beta."

Hahaha

Anybody know why?

Not enough users?

Folding the product into something else?

Having something as awesome as Cappuccino and a flagship app like 280 slides runs counter to the Google thesis that JavaScript isn't good enough? ;)

There was never a real market for it, Power Point and Google Presentation fills the need of most users i think.

To say that about Google is a little unfair, you can't argue they didn't try. Cappuccino is not that new any more and everyone is doing native apps right now.

I wonder what this means for Cappuccino. Coming from a mac developer, Cappuccino is awesome. I was able to jump right in writing a complicated web app right away without having to use any javascript, html, or CSS. Lots of web developers probably think this sounds stupid, but man, it's awesome.

Cappuccino is still doing well as an open source project. This won't have any impact (aside from the unfortunate loss of a high profile example, but it was also two years behind the state of the art).

Cappuccino stays open source.

If you are interested in an open source alternative there is Swinger which you can easily run your own copy of: http://swinger.quirkey.com/

What is 280 Slides? Ive never heard of this.

It was te original demo app for cappuccino the web app framework cloned from cocoa to JavaScript and based on objective-j. They went on to build a web equivalent of interface builder called atlas then got bought by Motorola.

Wow, that looks damned interesting. So should I drop the whole thing off my radar, or does Motorola axing everything not effect Objective-J and Cappuccino?

Atlas seems effectively dead. Cappuccino is still developed but the original founders (now at Motorola) seem to no longer be involved.

We're still involved, just not as much as we used to be, or as much as some of our other contributors, as we all have other responsibilities.

So is Atlas really...dead? I was really pulling for it there for a while

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