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One aspect of this, buying a company and then killing off all its products has been going on a long time. It's a destructive practice that causes a lot of dama
by bugsy 15y ago
One aspect of this, buying a company and then killing off all its products has been going on a long time.
It's a destructive practice that causes a lot of damage. It's also one of the reasons I am against copy protection - I have purchased products over the years that were killed when their company was acquired. This has resulted in years of my data that could no longer be used.
As a developer, I have gone through this in the past as one of the employees. You work for months or years on a product, then it is bought and killed off, the IP boxed up and put away forever untouchable like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Very frustrating from this angle as well.
- donw 15y agoMight I ask what's stopping you from launching a competing product? If the product was good in the first place, had enough traction to get noticed by Gootwitbook, and was something you really wanted, why not build it up yourself?
- bugsy 15y agoI have never had or heard of a contract situation where I could go off and build a competing product after being acquired by a competitor. Stuff gets locked up. This practice is one of the reasons behind some open source movements - the protection of inventions from getting annihilated in the event of takeover. These articles do not include the detail that Facebook (or whoever) released the source code of the acquired product into the public domain. They include the detail that the products were killed.