Slide.com shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Slide.com shutting down

slide.com

34 pointsdavyjones9 comments

Can someone explain why such high traffic sites like Slide.com, Picnik.com, Flektor.com, etc are often shutdown after acquisition? Even as of today these sites must be getting millions of hits. Not to mention that for many people it's still the go-to site for making slideshows, or picture editing.

Why not instead auction them off or maybe add a business model to cut some losses? It can't hurt more than shutting it down completely?

My guess is big companies get some sort of tax benefit from doing this? But is that the sole reason behind it? Or am I missing some part of the picture?

Lots of possibilities. Maybe the acquisition was for the talent, not the product. Maybe the acquisition was a strategic play to shut down potential competition for another product. Maybe there were personalities or politics driving the decision. Or, possibly, they're just idiots.

It would still have to be maintained so those resources are better used elsewhere. Nobody wants to work on products that aren't getting much attention either. For Google, I imagine it's about focusing on a few things that have massive potential (to really win) and they simply do not find it worthwhile spending more resources on selling it off.

> it's about focusing on a few things that have massive potential (to really win)

If you has to focus in order to success, you are already on the edge of fail. Remember Gmail? It was a 20% time casual product.[1]

[1]: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html

What, like say Apple? A company renowned for focusing on doing a small number of things well.

And what was the first thing Larry Page did when he took over as Google CEO? Start hacking away at projects that were going nowhere to focus on a smaller number of key areas.

Hits != money -- it's a huge time/energy/money sink that has no viable business model, you can't expect even a company with deep pockets like Google's to keep it alive forever...

The other thing is most of the people who developed this product have left Google - so maintaining a rapidly ageing code base is tough...

Sad :-( to see all the work from fellow sliders go away. It'll be survived by all the companies people from slide have now started:

Mixpanel, sosh, quixey, pathjoy, formula am, etc

what in the world is prizes.org? very odd thing to link to.

The last surviving slide-developed property post Google acquisition...

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