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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

> New users will not be able to sign up for Fig's products right now while we focus on optimizing them for existing customers and addressing some needs identified to integrate Fig with AWS.

This sounds a lot like the product is dead, and may emerge again at some point as an AWS hosted, Amazon branded product...

I'd never use a subscription + telemetry laden product like this in my core workflow, but sucks for the current users I guess.

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To me the whole post read like "we are aquihired, but we cannot admit we are are aquihired". The closing of registration driving it home.

If AWS bought it for the product, what reason would there ever be to stop the current business model entirely rather than leaving it on its current trajectory for a few months, untill said "needs" are addressed?

Reminds me of Slapdash's and Command-E acquisitions. Both still living in a limbo last I checked...

Command-E is now Dropbox Dash and has been receiving fairly heavy promotion.

I read it as “hosted AWS version coming soon, we will email you when it’s time to migrate”.

If it was just acquihire there probably wouldn’t have a big blog post tying it to AWS. Just negative publicity for acquirer when they could shut down quietly.

> If it was just acquihire there probably wouldn’t have a big blog post tying it to AWS. Just negative publicity for acquirer when they could shut down quietly.

That’s a good point.

But what reason is there to disable new registrations?

Terms of the acquisition, most likely. Existing customers are worth $x/yr. New customers with the new product are worth $y/yr. Finance doesn't want $x competing with $y. Something something financial models making the deal worth what they paid, so closing registration is simply part of the deal that was signed.

They want to move the customers to a new AWS service (that will be this product rebranded with AWS) and tie into AWS infrastructure instead of using a special system for sign in.

By preventing sign ups, they fix the number of accounts that will need to be migrated in future.

The blog post doesn't mean anything. HN is full of congratulatory posts of acquihires. They're all the same. "Now that we're part of $BIGCO we'll be working to integrate our technology into $BIGCO."

It never happens.

If $BIGCO had any intent to keep the product along, you'd be reading the post on $BIGCO's blog, not $FAILEDSTARTUP's blog.

Acquirers typically add terms to deal preventing vanity announcements and defining shutdown timeline. They don’t want the overhead of maintaining, or the negative brand hit. Each case is different, but there’s always a plan. They probably have some reason to keep maintaining the current customers/product, we can just guess what it is.

There is absolutely zero reason to believe that there is any plan to maintain this tiny product, let alone in any way to that is compatible with existing customers (if they exist).

Fig is only two, three years old at most.

> If AWS bought it for the product, what reason would there ever be to stop the current business model entirely rather than leaving it on its current trajectory for a few months, untill said "needs" are addressed?

That’s an easy one: if it’s burning money like crazy on its current hosting, but only because of rents extracted by one of their competitors, not for any inherent OpEx-intensity; and that therefore Amazon expects it to be profitable when moved to live rent-free on their hosting.

Do you know of any product that was acquihire and wasn't decimated?

GitHub?

I don't think anyone believed the GitHub acquisition was just an aquihire.

I think there’s the definition of acquihire.

Of all PR, I think I may hate acquisition PR the most. It is almost entirely just lies. And the same ones every time.

Just tell us if you just wanted the employees, just wanted some rights, wanted to integrate their product for your use, or just wanted to kill something off. I'm sick of reading the same new release for every acquisition knowing it's bullshit.

I was at Cloud9 which was acquired by Amazon. We took most of the existing frontend and tech and rebuilt the backend on AWS, then relaunched it as AWS Cloud9. In the meantime we sunset the existing service.

I'd assume the same thing is going to happen here.

How was the exit on your end

As an aside, can you explain to me why Cloud9 has never worked correctly in Safari? The cursor positioning in text has been messed up for as long as I can remember. AWS has never fixed it, despite having owned it for over a decade.

I worked at AWS from 2010 to 2014 after also getting acqui-hired (AWS SDK for PHP, fka CloudFusion).

I would never use a cloud-syncing cloud-connected terminal for simple security and privacy reasons alone, not to mention the fact that if it goes down I become basically disabled as a developer or admin.

Several companies have tried to SaaSify the terminal and failed, so I suspect I am not alone here.

"We've noticed that there's a component of the computing infrastructure that isn't sending everything you do to the cloud and charging monthly rent..."

Yes I'm genuinely shocked at the other comments here saying they use this happily; it should be a cause for concern. That it's now landing in Amazon's lap, doubly so.

> All cloud features are opt-in and your data is encrypted at rest. For autocomplete, all of your keystrokes are processed locally and never leave your device.

Fig is a great product.

If Fig goes down, you fall back to the regular shell that doesn't have autocomplete etc. If Fig gets hacked, that's scary, then again GitHub and others are similarly big targets.

Idk though, this doesn't seem useful enough to me as an individual that I'd bother looking into it. Maybe for a team or company.

As a side note, if your security relies on you typing things into your terminal, you're doing it wrong. AWS even makes you check a box when generating creds that basically says "I understand the way I'm doing this is insecure" when generating creds that will be used that way.

There are degrees of insecurity. Typing secrets into a terminal is not good. Typing secrets into a terminal with telemetry is worse.

I would use this as the way for company's command line tools to be provisioned to me as a team member. This means my tools can be separated from work tools

What’s wrong with a company git repo for that?

do people use git to provision environments? That is not a thing. What is in the repo? A dockerfile?

> Amazon has acquired Fig's technology!

That's a euphemism. These companies "acquire technology" in the same sense that revolutionaries acquired Louis XVI's head.

The telemetry was the exact reason I never tried it. It looked amazing, but wasn't keen on fig getting every one of my inputs

It actually makes sense for Amazon integrating this with the whole browser based shell thing (which is a sensible secure default for a lot of people).

Having something with autocomplete that works seamlessly with their services seems like a better idea than a plain prompt if you're going to use their shell. Hopefully they do something sensible and customer-centric with the telemetry stuff, that seemed to be the big drawback for many.

They give a timeline of a few weeks, so presumably we'll see soon enough.

Yeah, that is my expectation about its future as well. I really enjoyed using Fig for clear CLI introspection for many of my common workflows.

I am fully expecting that I'll have to go back to zsh-autosuggestions once the current iteration is fully wound down.

Isn't Fig open source? Now'd be the time for people to fork it while there's still the opportunity to do so if they find genuine value in the project.

My favorite 'acquihire' story is when Oracle bought out MySQL and the creator forked it and made MariaDB.

IIRC only their autocompletion recipes are. Not the actual application itself.

    when Oracle bought out MySQL and the creator forked it and made MariaDB

Not quite.

Wiki tells me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL#History

Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB (the company) in 2008.

Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010.

    The day Oracle announced the purchase of Sun, Michael "Monty" Widenius forked MySQL, launching MariaDB, and took a swath of MySQL developers with him.

Correct, I just kinda lumped it all together, apologies on the mix up. I rather miss when Sun was not owned by Oracle.

Yeah this is cloud9 all over again. Killing new registrations, eventually forcing existing users to migrate to AWS, for a worse product as a service.

Acquisitions are usually great for the shareholders, and usually bad for the employees and the customers.

At a startup, the employees are also shareholders.

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