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Miguel de Icaza is living the life right now. He managed to get Novell to fund his idea and then effectively bought it off of them for a steal. Well done! In

by tpatke 15y ago

Miguel de Icaza is living the life right now. He managed to get Novell to fund his idea and then effectively bought it off of them for a steal. Well done! Incidentally, I think this is the best way to start a business if you ever find yourself in the right position. Big companies are ditching / spinning off successful products which are just not "successful enough" and you can often pick them up for the cost of supporting existing customers.

xtracto 15y ago
>Incidentally, I think this is the best way to start a business if you ever find yourself in the right position. Big companies are ditching / spinning off successful products which are just not "successful enough" and you can often pick them up for the cost of supporting existing customers. I surely would hope that the same think had happened to several of the Google services that were killed a short time ago; specially Wave and Code Search. Although I know that at least Wave was made given to Apache, I think what that needed was a company that was willing to polish and provide the service.
- mseebach 15y ago
  Problem with that is two things: 1: Those products are build to run on Googles infrastructure, which you can't have if you're not Google. 2: Those products don't have customers, they have users. That makes spinning a profitable business off much harder.
  - quanticle 15y ago
    >1: Those products are build to run on Googles infrastructure, which you can't have if you're not Google. Not necessarily. At least with Google Wave [1], Google ensured that they made the necessary modifications to allow users to run Wave servers by themselves. There is at least one provider running wave-in-a-box [2], and there isn't any reason that this provider should be the only one. >2: Those products don't have customers, they have users. That makes spinning a profitable business off much harder. Harder yes, but it's still well short of impossible. I was thinking that the Wave Federation Protocol could perhaps be monetized as a shared-editing/collaboration service. It could be positioned as a combination of Sharepoint and chat. [1] http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-steps-wave-in-box.html http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n... [2] http://waveinabox.net/ http://waveinabox.net/
    - mseebach 15y ago
      The mechanism the OP referred to was picking up an existing product and providing a more or less uninterrupted user experience. It's a great benefit for a start-up to be able to hit the ground running with a user base and traction. In the case of Wave, there was a major gap between the product being declared EOL from Google and until the various bits and pieces for running Wave as an independent vendor was in place - and in that gap all reasonable people ran away, so non-Google Wave offerings are starting from scratch. As for money, no, certainly not impossible, but it's one more hurdle to hitting the ground running.
  - kiloaper 15y ago
    Wave, or at least something using the same ideas and specs, has been spun into several commerical products.
_delirium 15y ago
How willing companies are to do it seems to vary. A colleague of mine would jump at the chance to buy his now-defunct project from his former employer, and had lined up some funding to do so, but they don't think they'd make enough money spinning it off to be worth the hassle, so are just sitting on it instead, in case the IP might come in handy at some unknown point in the future.

by tpatke 15y ago

xtracto 15y ago

>Incidentally, I think this is the best way to start a business if you ever find yourself in the right position. Big companies are ditching / spinning off successful products which are just not "successful enough" and you can often pick them up for the cost of supporting existing customers. I surely would hope that the same think had happened to several of the Google services that were killed a short time ago; specially Wave and Code Search. Although I know that at least Wave was made given to Apache, I think what that needed was a company that was willing to polish and provide the service.

mseebach 15y ago
Problem with that is two things: 1: Those products are build to run on Googles infrastructure, which you can't have if you're not Google. 2: Those products don't have customers, they have users. That makes spinning a profitable business off much harder.
- quanticle 15y ago
  >1: Those products are build to run on Googles infrastructure, which you can't have if you're not Google. Not necessarily. At least with Google Wave [1], Google ensured that they made the necessary modifications to allow users to run Wave servers by themselves. There is at least one provider running wave-in-a-box [2], and there isn't any reason that this provider should be the only one. >2: Those products don't have customers, they have users. That makes spinning a profitable business off much harder. Harder yes, but it's still well short of impossible. I was thinking that the Wave Federation Protocol could perhaps be monetized as a shared-editing/collaboration service. It could be positioned as a combination of Sharepoint and chat. [1] http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-steps-wave-in-box.html http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n... [2] http://waveinabox.net/ http://waveinabox.net/
  - mseebach 15y ago
    The mechanism the OP referred to was picking up an existing product and providing a more or less uninterrupted user experience. It's a great benefit for a start-up to be able to hit the ground running with a user base and traction. In the case of Wave, there was a major gap between the product being declared EOL from Google and until the various bits and pieces for running Wave as an independent vendor was in place - and in that gap all reasonable people ran away, so non-Google Wave offerings are starting from scratch. As for money, no, certainly not impossible, but it's one more hurdle to hitting the ground running.
- kiloaper 15y ago
  Wave, or at least something using the same ideas and specs, has been spun into several commerical products.

_delirium 15y ago

How willing companies are to do it seems to vary. A colleague of mine would jump at the chance to buy his now-defunct project from his former employer, and had lined up some funding to do so, but they don't think they'd make enough money spinning it off to be worth the hassle, so are just sitting on it instead, in case the IP might come in handy at some unknown point in the future.