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Comment by whoiskevin | Hacker News Reader

I have to put the blame on Zenefits here. You cannot offer something to a customer that depends on integration with a competitor. Shame on you. No I don't support ADP and am not a fan but basic business dictates that you should not even offer this service if it depends on integration with a competitor.

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Zenefits' entire service is about re-selling and managing other services. That's like saying an accountant is at fault for relying on payroll processors that may someday decide they want to be accountants too - of course they're not at fault, that's how accounting is DONE. This is ridiculous on ADPs part.

I'm not close enough on the details so I could be wrong. But it sounds like a) Zenefits integrates to ADP and starts being the flow through for payroll. b) Zenefits decides to become a direct competitor to ADP by launching their own payroll service (ZenPayroll mentioned here) c) ADP isn't enthusiastic about supporting a service that plans to upsell or cross sell shared customers to move away from them.

Zenefits and ZenPayroll are two completely different companies. Don't let the "Zen" part confuse you. :)

Zenpayroll and Zenefits are different companies and unrelated except that they both did Y Combinator.

Thanks to both of you for correcting me

No offense, but this is standard business practice. Integration hooks are added to an application PURELY as a feature to make the application more compelling. Uses of the integration hooks which are not making the application more compelling will probably be undermined eventually.

Ultimately Zenefits is in this situation because they are more or less a UI or Orchestrator of other services that do the 'real' work. ADP was just tired of letting a middle man eat off of them.

Banning a specific domain from being part of a user's email address is not a "breaking integration", it's an intentional, anti-competitive action.

> depends on integration with a competitor

Zenefits wasn't a competitor to ADP, but it seems that ADP thinks that they may want to roll out a product that competes with Zenefits, so now they are trying to clear the playing field before they step onto it.

This would be similar to Apple deciding to screw up some 3rd party apps that run on OSX because they are working on a product that competes (but has not been announced or released yet). (And then you coming along claiming that said 3rd party software was a 'competitor' to Apple, so should just 'suck it up').

"This would be similar to Apple deciding to screw up some 3rd party apps that run on OSX"

I like how you specified "on OSX" because this is exactly what Apple has done multiple times on iOS. Remember Maps?

Zenefits doesn't actually offer payroll so they really aren't competitors (yet).

This model was well-established long before Zenefits hit the scene.

By your account, Walmart should manufacture all the items it sells, etc.

The key point is that it's an _unauthorized_ integration.

This is like shaming companies that make plugins for Google Apps. What is wrong with you?

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