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Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 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.

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 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.

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.

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).

How was the exit on your end

> 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?

I think there’s the definition of acquihire.

GitHub?

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

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.

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