![]() ![]() Long term it ended up pretty good, with Koum and Acton taking their acquisition money bags and pouring them into FOSS projects like FreeBSD and the Signal Foundation. Integration of E2EE into Whatsapp/FB Messaging is one of the few examples of Zuck being on the right side of things. OWS helped secure their app further after the 2014 acquisition by FB, but encryption was something stressed by Koum and Acton from the get-go. Whatsapp announced encryption to the world in 2012. As far as I can tell, Keybase has never had a business model or constant source of revenue. It's pretty much always cheaper to gut the original product, ignore the problems with your software, and enjoy the enhanced price of your shares while effectively spending no more money than you had for the original acquisition. Facebook purchasing Whatsapp, another service that formerly stressed encryption, resulted in things like plaintext backups of your texts on Facebook servers being aggressively promoted as soon as you loaded the app. How many of us are running RHL? Skype is now close to Microsoft spyware that's impossible to remove from a Windows installation. I can't think of a single instance where acquisition of a smaller company like this resulted in an improved version of the original product. They'll probably gut Keybase, move their Chinese server generated AES128 keys to AES256 keys generated by you and uploaded to their Chinese server, then call it a day. If Keybase acquired Zoom (haha), then, sure. Keep them on the project they became experts on and they stay experts. If the "home" product was failing to foster in-house expertise before then chances are high that it's a problem based on culture and priorities and experts injected from outside would quickly lose their edge. With lower expectations however, continuing to fund the project in question can be bargain for getting a pool of in-house consultants to occasionally tap into for the "home" product, if they are really as good.Īnd even if retention wasn't a problem at all, skilled people are not inherently skilled, they need to keep challenging themselves in their area of expertise to stay sharp. How much will the new team contribute to the "home" product? If expectations are too high chances are that much of the team won't stay and the acquisition will turn out to be a waste of money. It's a question of pocket depth and expectations. Allowing the acquired team to continue what they were doing is the only somewhat foolproof strategy to deal with it. The biggest challenge with acquihiring is retention. The entire system is built to favour those people. ![]() Sure, poor people with either very little or no capital spend that capital on necessities, and thus drive the economy, but there's no evidence that people with large amounts of capital spend that on anything at all, there's more evidence that they hoard it and seek only to acquire more capital. There's no such evidence that people with money actually spend it in ways other than investment, and the sole purpose of that isn't to donate to companies that need it, it's to profit off it and essentially hoard more capital. ![]() In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.Ĭapitalism is about acquiring capital, i.e. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. I mean, there's a fatal flaw in the broken window fallacy anyway: Placing those music files in has a much better shot of preserving that creative legacy for future generations than leaving it on SoundCloud. SoundCloud is not in the business of preserving the creative work they are in the business of aggregating users and they use user content to do it. ![]() I think that is convincing enough for me to see it as a critical piece of free and open web, even if this doesn't seem obviously connected to the idea of preserving a legacy.įor example, an indie musician wouldn't have to rely on SoundCloud to keep their recorded music around. They won't have to (directly) pay upkeep to keep that legacy preserved. The kind of things you want to store in there are the things you want the world and your descendents to have access to after you die. You don't use to store things in the cloud that people normally think as "cloud storage", not for the day-to-day stuff. Their long-term mission is preserving a digital legacy, oriented around relationships, families, and organizations. However, after playing with it, checking out their board of directors, and deconstructing their app design, their vision is not really "cloud storage", at least, not the way we typically think of it. We'll see how well they execute their vision. ![]()
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