Getting acquired by Google isn't always that great
flickr.com
flickr.com
As they are now, they seem to have been stagnant for a long time. When I was trying to enter the space against them I always assumed it was because they had a big play coming down the pipes, but I see now they just failed.
I also don't have a lot of sympathy for those guys, those two alone should have been enough to engineer the product they needed. From the outside looking in, it seems like they had more than enough time, and they wasted it being complacent.
For an example of a situation that I'd like to be in, look at Thawte. By selling it, Mark Shuttleworth got enough money that he could do things he was passionate about but might not be profitable in the near future, like paying people to write open source software. For me, it would be investing my time and money in the education of others to make sure more people could reach their full potential.
So if someone swindled me out of a business I wanted to see actually change the world in exchange for a couple of million dollars and the expectation that I'd be able to keep developing that business, I'd be pissed. It just puts you in a middle zone where you don't have to worry about money that much, but you still can't do whatever you want. That's lame.
If they really are so passionate about this grand vision why couldn't they push it through Google? Then they give up and start doing totally different things. Doesn't seem like the dogged determination of visionaries to me.
I suspect they realized how little incentive there is for them to bust their asses pushing the product through Google bureaucracy, and that no one was pulling for them, so they quit.