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Comment by vfclists | Hacker News Reader

Twitter didn't shut them down because they wanted the team, they just wanted to destroy the product.

Undermining products which threaten them is the policy of the major corporations. It was a space they were not ready to enter so they destroyed the product.

It is the same reason why they destroyed Flash rather than fix it faults. More than 10 years later HTML5 does not match Flash in productivity.

Flash meant end users couldn't be locked into their app stores, and even to this date Apple is crippling Safari to undermine web based apps.

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This reads like paranoia... Twitter had nothing to gain or lose from controlling the fate of DabbleDB. Chances are they were on a classic, mindless acquisition spree, and Dabble folks saw their chance to make bank.

> It is the same reason why they destroyed Flash

Lol, Flash destroyed itself. Adobe thought they could forever extract rent from Flash's early gains, slowing development momentum in order to assimilate it in their products and processes; and then they underestimated the power of Apple's influence on the web ecosystem.

Really?

How easy would it be to create a Flash product competing with Adobe's current online offerings back then it Flash existed? The simply truth is that any of Adobe's competitors could have developed an even before Adobe decided to rent their software.

To what extent would software developers depend on Apple's app store if high quality applications could be delivered through the browser?

What would happen to the 30% tax Google and Apple levy on app store sales?

Mozilla even started via Shumway then canned it because they are in Google's pocket.

Did Microsoft's Silverlight have these problems?

Why has HTML5 turned out to be such a horrible after more than a decade? It still has nothing on Flash.

I'm amazed about the kind of economic blindness that exists among "developers" which for the most part means people trying to force square pegs into round holes that characterizes web based development.

> How easy would it be to create a Flash product competing with Adobe's current online offerings back then it Flash existed?

They did, Silverlight was it. MS pushed it as hard as they could, and... it bombed. Because it had the same problems as Flash, which most developers already reviled: it produced proprietary, black-box binary blobs that only one vendor knew how to run properly, and it presented big security and performance challenges.

Meanwhile, plain old html was something that everyone could work with, as long as the spec was public. The browser had a hard sandbox and very well-delimited capabilities. And that worked just fine, before Chrome ate the marketshare (thanks in no small part to Mozilla losing the plot, chasing ghosts in the OS space while Firefox floundered).

> Why has HTML5 turned out to be such a horrible after more than a decade?

Because shit is hard and browsers have different priorities.

> I'm amazed about the kind of economic blindness

Says the one with a broken website.

My vague recollection is that, after DabbleDB, they were working on a new product - some sort of analytics dashboard (?) - they did an early demo of it, and I gather someone at Twitter saw this and thought "oh wow, we need those guys working for us".

I suspect DabbleDB as a product, and its existing user base, was irrelevant in this decision.

Do you have any evidence for Twitters motivation in this case? I don't see how dabbledb constituted even a theoretical threat to Twitter.

Large companies may compete with each other but they will always join forces to screw the consumer.

https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2010/more-than-dab...

Which companies own the online data analysis tools market now?

Why couldn't Twitter continue with the products development back then?

Did they truly consider their contribution of those employees to their company more valuable than the potential of the product, or were they against the product falling into hands of another company?

Ah, DabbleDB was more of a "web database", "no code / low code" tool...not data analysis.

Meaning more like what Airtable does.

I don't think Twitter ever had any plans for that space.

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