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Comment by cryptozeus | Hacker News Reader

100% on point, classic case of drinking ai cool aid and killing what users wanted

The thing is they make the correct diagnoses of Arc's issues [1], but then instead of addressing them and doing the hard work of building a great product, they took the easy way out and started another greenfield project. How often has that ever been a good decision?

1 - https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...

> How often has that ever been a good decision?

It got them acquired, so certainly it worked for them this time.

> doing the hard work of building a great product

How often has that ever been a good decision?

You're assuming that Dia is what Atlassian wanted in this acquisition, and nothing else. We don't know what things would look like if they had continued developing Arc.

Almost every successful company has got there by grinding away on hard problems. No one launches a product and gets endless growth for free. Not to say that Arc would have definitely succeeded, but to date it's been a lot more successful than Dia.

> You're assuming that Dia is what Atlassian wanted in this acquisition

I thought it was an acquihire.

They wanted Arc. The founders and others at Atlassian loved Arc. I am sure Dia is allowed to continue until it doesn’t work. Which it wont.

> How often has that ever been a good decision?

The migration to OSX or all Windows upgrades certainly payed off for those companies.

I don't think this is a good comparison. There are many startups that have succeeded developing good products, but very few that could match the success of Apple.

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